Sadness and Happiness by Robert Pinsky

Author:Robert Pinsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Generation Before

TO FRANK BIDART

The wind blew. Some days, rain

Falling the size of nickels

Splashed up over the curb.

There were hats for that, and for sun

Too, frying shoeleather in its hot cycles.

Flesh was a poor garb,

So poor, the people were quaint—

Muffled up into their high cars

Or their quaint bulky clothing.

In the prolonged slap-happy Lent

Of the times, harder than yours,

Eating or asleep, breathing,

They got by in their manner, at times

Made Carnival in hotel bars,

At ball games or the track. In photographs,

In films, even in their haberdashery, games

And swank gear (cases, lighters,

Syphons, clips, objects for looks or laughs

Of glass, pigskin, malachite)

They survive as a vague murmur of style,

The nostalgic false life of a face

Shining from a snapshot. Time will not

Light gently on those fathers. They will fall

Sick in the lungs and the heart, hapless

In a motel, swearing at their own lost

Flickery past, craving a field

Empty and large, the growth pale and recent

Over the plow-twisting tangle of the past—

The grasses coarse, unculled,

The impossible field of the present.

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