Hammers and Nails

Carpentry

Ira Sadoff

It feels so good
hammering
the eyes of nails


the center of the house
I am holding up
a kind of power


like a bone in the fist,
someone who owns the world
he lives in - it is not


easy, it is not
what I have been 
with others, small


as the circle
in my eyes, lids
I have never opened.


This is a real house I live in, 
it keeps
my family close as


my breath, and like it
they move in and out
of me, all when I hold


this hammer, this hammer
in my hand is like an eye:
it breaks everything it sees.




I found this poem today while flipping through the books on the shelves. I really enjoy the unsentimentality, especially on the subject of home and family. Even in talented hands it can get mawkish fast.


Then there are the line breaks: rather than arbitrary and hip, they break up the rhythm and still add to the sense of the poem. I love the line "this hammer, this hammer" which ends one thought and begins another, but you still get the movement and feeling and weight in that single line. This one is a master class in caesura and enjambment (putting pauses at the ends of lines or letting a phrase spill over into the next line).


In addition to being some good writing, it puts me very much in mind of another poem that hit me like a haymaker sucker-punch when I was first falling in love with poetry.

Love Song: I and Thou

Alan Dugan

Nothing is plumb, level or square:
    the studs are bowed, the joists
are shaky by nature, no piece fits
    any other piece without a gap
or pinch, and bent nails
    dance all over the surfacing
like maggots. By Christ
    I am no carpenter. I built
the roof for myself, the walls
    for myself, the floors
for myself, and got 
    hung up in it myself. I
danced with a purple thumb
    at this house-warming, drunk
with my prime whiskey: rage.
    Oh I spat rage's nails
into the frame-up of my work:
    It held. It settled plumb.
level, solid, square and true
    for that one great moment. Then
it screamed and went on through,
    skewing as wrong the other way.
God damned it. This is hell,
    but I planned it I sawed it
I nailed it and I
    will live in it until it kills me.
I can nail my left palm
  to the left-hand cross-piece but
I can't do everything myself.
  I need a hand to nail the right,
a help, a love, a you, a wife.




It's so muscular and masculine, but also fragile and shaky. It's earthy but metaphorical, with allusions to Jesus and Satan, with a little bit of Dante's lovers Francesca and Paolo.


But there's something about the rhymes, too. The slant-rhyme, the internal rhymes (God damned it. This is hell,/but I planned it.), it's all so tightly constructed but still ramshackle and thrown together. 


When I get ambitious, that's how I try to write. I just keep trying to imitate those constructions and architecture. Maybe even knock-off buildings are worthwhile.