"Radar" begins by taking something away. Before the speaker shows us a single image, we are told that "No one exactly knows / Exactly how clouds look in the sky / Or the shape of the mountains below them / Or the direction in which fish swim." The sentence is odd in a pleasing way. We feel we know these things, since clouds and mountains are about the most familiar sights there are, yet the poem insists that our knowledge is blurry, secondhand, approximate. The title adds to the puzzle. Radar is a device for detecting what the eye cannot, for sensing shapes and movements at a distance, and the poem seems to ask what instrument we have for the things that matter most to us. Its answer, by the end, is a quiet and painful one: perhaps none.
The first stanza gives two reasons for our ignorance. "The eye is jealous of whatever moves," the speaker says, a striking phrase. Jealousy suggests that sight grasps greedily at what it cannot hold, always chasing the passing thing and never quite possessing it. Meanwhile "the heart / Is too far buried in the sand / To tell." The heart, then, is no better a guide. Between a restless eye and a buried heart, the poem leaves us without a reliable way of knowing the world or one another. The line break after "the heart" is worth noticing, because the heart stands alone for a moment, isolated on its own line before we learn where it is stuck.
The second stanza turns outward, almost gladly. The speaker watches "deep blue creatures" pass "as if they were sunshine," which blends the sea with light and makes the animals seem weightless and nearly unreal. The tone shifts here from uncertainty to something like wonder, and the word "Look" interrupts the sentence like a tap on the shoulder, as though the speaker were pointing to the water while standing beside someone. The details are tender: "Those fins, those closed eyes / Admiring each last drop of the ocean." Closed eyes are a curious thing to give a swimming creature. They suggest contentment, or a kind of trust, an ability to move through the world without needing to see it, which is the opposite of the jealous eye of the first stanza. The fish know their direction without anyone exactly knowing it for them.
Then the poem breaks into the personal. "I crawled into bed with sorrow that night / Couldn't touch his fingers." Sorrow is treated almost like a bedfellow, and the flat, unadorned phrasing makes the admission hit harder after the lyrical second stanza. The poem never explains who "he" is or why his fingers are out of reach, and it would be a mistake to invent an answer. What the text does give us is the pronoun, the missing punctuation between the two clauses, and the sense of a gap that cannot be crossed. Read this way, the opening stanza begins to look like preparation. The inability to know exactly where the fish swim is the same inability to reach a person, even one close enough to imagine touching.
The ending refuses to resolve anything. The speaker returns to the sea and sky: "the splash / Of the water / The noisy movement of cloud / The push of the humpbacked mountains / Deep at the sand's edge." Where the first stanza said we cannot know these things, the last offers them anyway, now loud and physical, with "splash," "noisy," and "push" crowding the lines. The mountains are "humpbacked" like whales, so the landscape and the sea creatures blur into one another, and the sand returns from the first stanza, where the heart was buried. The poem ends in the very place where it began, at the edge of what can be perceived.
Formally, "Radar" is free verse, with no regular rhyme or meter, and its short, uneven lines let sentences stop and start as thoughts do. The repetition of "No one exactly knows" works almost like a refrain, and the poem's stubborn plainness of diction keeps it from tipping into sentimentality. That plainness is what makes it memorable. It treats longing as a problem of knowledge, and then lets the sea, the cloud, and the mountain say what the speaker cannot.