Pinsky - At the foundling hospital: poems

O what a stroke, to invent Music from an empty case Strung with bloody filaments The wiry rabbitflesh Plucked or strummed, Pulled taut across the gutted Resonant hull of the turtle: Music from a hollow shell And the insides of a rabbit. Sweet conception, sweet Instrument of mind, Mind, mind: Mind Itself a capable vibration Thrumming from here to there In the cloven brainflesh Contained in its helmet of bone Like an electronic boxful Of channels and filaments Bundled inside a case, A little musical robot Dreamed up by the mind Embedded in the brain With its blood-warm channels And its humming network Of neurons, engendering The newborn baby god As clever and violent As his own instrument Of sweet, all-consuming Imagination, held By its own vibration: Mind, mind, mind pulled Taut in its bony shell, Dreaming up Heaven and Hell. At the summit of Mauna Kea, an array of antennae Sensitive to the colors of invisible light. Defiling The sacred mountain, they tilt and sidle to measure Submillimeter waves from across the universe: System of cosmic removes and fine extremes Devoted to track the wavering nature of things. Your father Adam known also as Mkea, Your mother Lakshmi known also as Eve: Both of them smaller than the width of a hair, They ride astride matched tortoises on a road Nine microns wide, following another Eve And another Adam all in a skybound procession Of mothers and fathers, all the Lakshmis and Vishnus Tendering you their Cain and you their Abel. The snow Papa and the fire Pele observe tainting Antennae controlled by a hand in Massachusetts.

Innumerable names and doings, innumerable Destinies, remote histories, deities and tongues. Somewhere among them your ancestor the slave, Also your ancestors the thief the prince the stranger. Each particle a thread of crazed pilgrim life Passing as one tortoise mount pauses to tread The emanation of a dead star still alive And afire, back when the astral procession began. Everybody by descent the outcome of a rape. Everybody also the outcome of a great love. Ruth, Holofernes, Sappho, Abelard, mostly Anonymous traveling a filament of light Across the nothing between the clouds of being Into the pinhole iris of your mortal eye The heart of each telescope on Mauna Kea, Is a tube finer than a hair on Vishnus head.

On each hair of each Vishnus head, a procession Of subatomic tortoises crosses the universe. In the skull of each tortoise in that procession A faceted jewel attuned to a spectral channel Where Kronos eats us his children, each contracting By each ones nature a micron suture of light. Im tired of the gods, Im pious about the ancestors: afloat in The wake widening behind me in time, those restive devisers. My father had one job from high school till he got fired at thirty. The year was 1947 and his boss, planning to run for mayor, Wanted to hire an Italian veteran, he explained, putting it In plain English. I was seven years old, my sister was two.

The barbarian tribes in the woods were so savage the Empire Had to conquer them to protect and clear its perimeter. So into the woods Rome sent out missions of civilizing Governors and forces to establish schools, courts, garrisons: Soldiers, clerks, priests, citizens with their household slaves. Years, decades, entire lives were spent in those hinterlands Which might be good places to retire on a government pension, Especially if in your work-years you had acquired a native wife. Often I get these things wrong or at best mixed up, but I do Feel piety toward those persistent mixed families in Gaul, Britain, Thrace. When I die may I take my place in the wedge Widening and churning in the mortal ocean of years of souls. The Roman colonizing and mixing, the Imperial processes Of legal enslaving and freeing, involved not just the inevitable Fucking in all senses of the word, but also marriages and births As developers and barbers, scribes and thugs mingled and coupled With the native people and peoples.

Begetting and trading, they Had to swap, blend and improvise languagescouples especially Needed to invent French, Spanish, German: and I confess Roman, barbarianI find that Creole work more glorious than God. The way it happened, the school sent around a notice: anybody Interested in becoming an apprentice optician, raise your hand. It was the Great Depression, anything about a job sounded good to Milford Pinsky, who told me he thought it meant a kind of dentistry. Anyway, he was bored sitting in study hall, so he raised his hand, And he got the job as was his destinyfull-time, once he graduated. Joe Schiavone was the veteran who took the job, not a bad guy. Dr.

Vineburg did get elected mayor, Joe worked for him for years. At the bank, John Smock, an Episcopalian whose family once owned The bank, had played sports with Milford, and he gave him a small Loan with no collateral, so he opened his own shop, grinding lenses And selling glasses: as his mother-in-law said, almost a Professional. Optician comes from a Greek word that has to do with seeing. Banker comes from an Italian word for a bench, where people sat, To make loans or change. Pinsky like Tex or Brooklyn is a name Nobody would have if they were still in that same place: those names all Signify someone whos been away from home a while. Schiavone Means a Slav or slave.

Milford is a variant on the poets names Milton, Herbert, Sidneycertain immigrants used to give their offspring. Creole comes from a word meaning to breed or to create, in a place. My real name is Israel Beilin. My father Was a Roman slave who gained his freedom. I was first named Ralph Waldo Ellison but I changed it to the name of one of your cities Because I was born a Jew in Byelorussia. I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not.

My other name is Flaccus. I wrote an essay On the theme You Choose Your Ancestors. It wont be any feeble, conventional wings Ill rise onnot I, born of poor parents. Look: My ankles are changed already, new white feathers Are sprouting on my shoulders: these are my wings. Across the color line I summon Aurelius And Aristotle: threading through Philistine And Amalekite they come, all graciously And without condescension. I took the name Irving or Caesar or Creole Jack.

Some day theyll Study me in Hungary, Newark and L.A., so Spare me your needless tribute. Spare me the red Hideousness of Georgia. I wrote your White Christmas for you. And my third name, Burghardt, Is Dutch: for all you know I am related to Spinoza, Walcott, Pissarroand in fact my Grandfather Burghardts first name was Othello. Arbitrary but also essential. Before you can remember you will have found You are Parvati or Adam, Anne or Laquan, all With one same meaning: the meaning of the past, A thunder cloud.

Byron De La Beckwith, Primo Levi. Medgar, Edgar, Hrothgar. Ishbaal. Not just an allusion, but also an example: Each with its meaning but also An instance of the meaning of naming. Lightning. Abdi. Ikey Moe. Ikey Moe.