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![]() (For help, see a note about the audio.) Also by Robert Pinsky: from The Inferno of Dante (1994) The Tuning (1995) Return to: An Audible Anthology Poetry Pages |
JERSEY RAINNow near the end of the middle stretch of roadWhat have I learned? Some earthly wiles. An art. That often I cannot tell good fortune from bad, That once had seemed so easy to tell apart. The source of art and woe aslant in wind Dissolves or nourishes everything it touches. What roadbank gullies and ruts it doesn't mend It carves the deeper, boiling tawny in ditches. It spends itself regardless into the ocean. It stains and scours and makes things dark or bright: Sweat of the moon, a shroud of benediction, The chilly liquefaction of day to night, The Jersey rain, my rain, soaks all as one: It smites Metuchen, Rahway, Saddle River, Fair Haven, Newark, Little Silver, Bayonne. I feel it churning even in fair weather To craze distinction, dry the same as wet. In ripples of heat the August drought still feeds Vapors in the sky that swell to smite the state -- The Jersey rain, my rain, in streams and beads Of indissoluble grudge and aspiration: Original milk, replenisher of grief, Descending destroyer, arrowed source of passion, Silver and black, executioner, font of life.
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BIOGRAPHYStone wheel that sharpens the blade that mows the grain,Wheel of the sunflower turning, wheel that turns The spiral press that squeezes the oil expressed From shale or olives. Particles that turn to mud On the potter's wheel that spins to form the vessel That holds the oil that drips to cool the blade. My mother's dreadful fall. Her mother's dread Of all things: death, life, birth. My brother's birth Just before the fall, his birth again in Jesus. Wobble and blur of my soul, born only once, That cleaves to circles. The moon, the eye, the year, Circle of causes or chaos or turns of chance. The line of a tune as it cycles back to the root, Arc of the changes. The line from there to here Of Ellen speaking, thread of my circle of friends, The art of lines, chord of the circle of work. Radius. Lives of children growing away, The plant radiant in air, its root in dark.
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VESSELWhat is this body as I fall asleep again?What I pretended it was when I was small -- A crowded vessel, a starship or submarine Dark in its dark element, a breathing hull, Arms at the flanks, the engine heart and brain Pulsing, feet pointed like a diver's, the whole Resolutely diving through the oblivion Of night with living cargo. O carrier shell That keeps your trusting passengers from All: Some twenty thousand times now you have gone Out into blackness tireless as a seal, Blind always as a log, but plunging on Across the reefs of coral that scrape the keel -- O veteran immersed from toe to crown, Buoy the population of the soul Toward their destination before they drown.
Robert Pinsky is the poet laureate of the United States. His collection Jersey Rainwill be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux this month. Copyright © 2000 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; April 2000; Three Poems; Volume 285, No. 4; page 105. |
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