Here is an instrument as blunt
and hardheaded as its employer.
What has it done? It has forced the nail
waist deep into the wood,
while the nail has spoiled its pleasure
by bending. Now the hammer must
remove the nail with its huge teeth,
curved like goat horns.
The hammer must undo what is half-done
and begin again with a new, willing nail,
a nail that seems guileless as it says, “I do.”
Crude work is in the hammer’s very nature.
No one wonders where it is to be grasped
with the whole hand. It’s clearly designed
to strike, to crack a brown-haired coconut
or a marrow bone. It’s a fist, only harder.
The hammer’s simple tongue is easily acquired:
a few elementary ejaculations
and one is fluent.
Deep in autumn I sometimes hear
a distant, solitary hammer
drumming on shingles or a two-by-four
while falling leaves foreshadow
something whiter and more serious.
How soon our days end —
yet the manly hammer is the last to retire.
Its head grows cold, its eyesight poor.
Is that a nail, the shadow of a nail,
a thumbnail? We’ll know in a moment.