Four Poems by Matthew Nienow

Who Belongs

to the long on
& on of the boatyard’s dim

cycle: boats hauled

to the tune of gravity’s rude
tests, while the gravel palls

below what’s left of too many

spent hulls
once ready for squalls,

now no more than

a few dark feet gone
from life’s longest run:

rot’s oblivion:

Opening the Shop

Swing wide the double doors in the dust rising dim

Unlock the heart you keep in the cabinet of your gnarled self

Unlatch each finger from its presupposed grip

No hammer is yet needed

No blade or water stone skimmed with dark grains of yesterday’s work

Only the light’s steady buzz

And your eye’s slow progress

As over planking it passes

As over frames and the stern sheet’s long horseshoe

Each bronze nail puckered surely around the rove

Leave your haste behind you

More than a day’s work is at stake

I Have a Canvas Work Tote Entirely Devoted

to my essential hammers, and all my hammers
are essential, each mallet, sledge, cross- and ball-peen,

bronze-headed, shafts of angular hickory

or smoothed ash, a few worn to the thin edge
of their lives by the work of strangers who

abandoned them to thrift, their heads clamoring

together in the bag’s soot dark, while, as in the marina’s
masted haven, their handles rise up past

the canvas horizon, begging to be used.

The Magazine

is evening-lit in your hands
so the boat it shows

in its small square of water
has the light of the room, the windows

behind you, the reflected bay—
the magazine’s horizon

nearly the same, so no matter
how you try to strip the room

of metaphor and meaning, the room
becomes the boat, which you are in,

hardly alone with your red sails
and curtain wind