Selected Poems by Robert Pinsky

Author:Robert Pinsky
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781466878488
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

WINDOW

Our building floated heavily through the cold

On shifts of steam the raging coal-fed furnace

Forced from the boiler’s hull. In showers of spark

The trolleys flashed careening under our cornice.

My mother Mary Beamish who came from Cork

Held me to see the snowfall out the window—

Windhold she sometimes said, as if in Irish

It held wind out, or showed us that wind was old.

Wind-hole in Anglo-Saxon: faces like brick,

They worshipped Eastre’s rabbit, and mistletoe

That was Thor’s jissom where thunder struck the oak.

We took their language in our mouth and chewed

(Some of the consonants drove us nearly crazy

Because we were Chinese—or was that just the food

My father brought from our restaurant downstairs?)

In the fells, by the falls, the Old Ghetto or New Jersey,

Little Havana or Little Russia—I forget,

Because the baby wasn’t me, the way

These words are not. Whoever she was teaching to talk,

Snow she said, Snow, and you opened your small brown fist

And closed it and opened again to hold the reflection

Of torches and faces inside the window glass

And through it, a cold black sheen of shapes and fires

Shaking, kitchen lights, flakes that crissed and crossed

Other lights in lush diagonals, the snowcharmed traffic

Surging and pausing—red, green, white, the motion

Of motes and torches that at her word you reached

Out for, where you were, it was you, that bright confusion.

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