Fog opens the poem and fog closes it, and everything in between is a failed attempt to be somewhere. In Omar Willey's "Radar," a damaged vessel moves from quay to quay, cannot tie up, and finally slips away on the tide toward the mist that has been waiting all along. Willey never says what the vessel stands for. The poem is about drifting, about a self that cannot find anything to hold on to, and the reader decides whether the cause is grief, age, loneliness or something harder to name.
The title is the first puzzle. Radar is what a ship uses to see through fog, yet no instrument appears anywhere in the twelve lines. There is only hull, rig and weather, so the title names exactly what is missing. The word is also a palindrome, and the poem circles in a similar way, ending in the fog where it began ("Like fog upon the sea," then "the fog awaits…"). Radar works by sending out a signal and listening for what returns. It is tempting to hear that idea in "How far the sound and strait," where "sound" is a stretch of water but also an echo that never comes back.
The central image is odd in a useful way. A "bel étage" is the grand main floor of a large house, so Willey grafts a piece of architecture onto a ship, and the result is a home that floats and can't stay put. The word "my" makes the damage personal. Judging by the imagery, the speaker's own dignity or inner life is the wreck. The sailor's vocabulary that follows ("rig tattered, jib dislodged") is blunt and concrete by comparison. The syntax also drifts. The first stanza is one long delayed sentence, and its verb, "drifts," arrives only in the last line.
Pronouns shift quietly as the poem goes on. The first stanza says "my," the second says "it," and the third uses neither. The speaker first owns the broken vessel, then watches it from outside, then disappears from the sentence altogether. That may be the poem's saddest movement.
In the second stanza the boat "cannot find a pin / there to tie its line." A pin and a line are mooring tools, though they also suggest the small attachments that hold a life in place. The little word "so" is left dangling at the end of a line, and the next line, "into the tidal flow," slides straight off it. Then comes "and gone again," where "again" suggests this has happened before and will happen again.
The form is stricter than the subject. Each of the three quatrains rhymes ABBA, so the outer lines enclose the inner pair, much as harbor walls enclose water. Even the rhymes can fail to hold, though. "Étage" and "dislodged" match only in their final soft consonant sound, a rhyme that is itself slightly broken. Every stanza also runs six syllables a line for three lines, then drops to four. "Drifts quay to quay," "and gone again" and "the fog awaits…" each cut off early, like a breath running out.
The final stanza turns to exclamation. "How heavy harbor's head" piles up h sounds into something like a sigh, and "head" could mean the inner end of the harbor or something weighed down. "No sail, no thread" strips away the last of the cloth and the last connecting line, which fits the earlier word "tattered." The fog is the only thing left with agency, and it simply "awaits," patient and personified. The ellipsis leaves the poem unfinished, as though the vessel has gone beyond where words can follow.
What makes "Radar" worth reading is its economy and restraint. In a dozen short lines it keeps one metaphor going without explaining it, and it sets tidy, enclosing rhymes against a story of coming loose. The poem doesn't say what has been lost. It shows the ordinary tools for holding on, a pin, a line and a harbor, all failing to work.