The lines are pentameters except the fifth lines are trimeters and the ninth lines are trochaic tetrameters.
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My father’s toolbox like a seaman’s chest
Rests with its rusted handles on my floor;
In a blue moon I lift its lid and more
Than fifty years leap out to wrench my breast:
Those knocked and much-used tools,
The fretsaws, hammers, chisels, planes and drills,
Corroded, with split stocks and other ills,
But most that smell of putty, oil and stain,
Warm like summer-heated grease,
Recall the garden shed where deep in peace
That box through my long childhood years had lain.
The
shed was rotted, sieved by breeze and rain,
Though
dark and crammed with household casualties,Cracked buckets, backless chairs, dust and dead bees,
And paint and creosote tins, a shattered pane;
The roof bore wind-spot pools
Where sags in the flat felting hinted at
Weak boards. Regardless, agile as a cat,
I would climb the roof and at my lookout gaze
Westward like Raleigh in thrall
To dreams of deep water and what might sprawl
At voyage end across the sea’s rough baize.
Now
all that’s left of hope and thrill are days
And
that scarred toolbox dragged at the cart’s tail;Unsurely settled, limbs no longer hale,
I walk my garden in its May-time glaze
Unpicking memory’s wools;
A home long lost, a brother in decline,
No brash career or family to call mine:
Ah, blackbird chanting in the apple tree,
Blossomed white like the sea’s surge,
What piling cloudscape at horizon’s merge
Will rapture you but overshadow me?
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©
May 2015