Bibliofreakblog

FreeVerse: To the Phoenix

Cara is still on blogging hiatus, but she’s set up some FreeVerse posts, so onward we march, in search of love, and truth, and iambic pentameter.

Robert Pinsky is one of my favorite poets.  I did a paper on his collection Jersey Rain in college, and then about a year after I graduated I went to a reading and got the book signed (and I told him all about how I did a paper on it and he was very cool, and told me that his daughter was attending the University of Michigan, which is where my husband went).

Anyways.  My two favorite poems in this slim volume are “Ode to Meaning” and “An Alphabet of My Dead”, which are the two longest poems in the book, at three and nine pages, respectively.

So I chose a much shorter one, that still captures what I like so much about Pinsky.

“To the Phoenix” by Robert Pinsky

Dark herald, self-conceived in the desert waste,
What yang or yin enfolds your enigma best?

Memory, whose wing of fire displaces the past–
Or the present, brooding in its ashen nest?

Singing in the flames of Hell, triumphant Christ
Harrowing with Being the Nihil of the Beast–

Or, one foot lifted, one foot planted in dust, 
Lord Shiva dancing, hammer in fist?

You are the emblem of emigrants who crossed
Ocean and continent on their long flight West,

And Entropy’s immobile image: chaste
and labile, fluent at rest and saved when lost.

Is time your circle that never comes to rest,
Or the long flight of an arrow Brahma released?

Shakespeare appoints the swan your funeral priest,
The dove your spouse, at rites that you outlast–

Your true counterpart is Speech, the profane ghost:
The quick boy brandishing his lighting-burst.