History of My Heart by Robert Pinsky

Source of book: I own this.

 

Let me start this one with a bit of a story. As a kid, I loved poetry - I’ve written on this blog about the poets that first charmed me - Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost. I continued to read a poem occasionally as an adult, but kind of got away from it. 

 

What drew me back to poetry, and convinced me to make it a regular part of my reading, was a series of articles in Slate by Robert Pinsky. He would read the poems, and analyze them - it was good stuff, and his readings were wonderful. As were the discussions in the comments. I really learned a lot, and found that my love of poetry had been rekindled. 

 

From there, I checked out a copy of the anthology he put together, Essential Pleasures, which introduced me to a number of more modern poets I hadn’t really read. Next up was his wonderful translation of Inferno. Finally, my wife found me this copy of Pinksy’s own poems, spanning from 1966 through 1996. I previously wrote about Sadness and Happiness, and return in this case to an earlier collection, History of My Heart. 

 

History of My Heart was published in 1984, and contains a number of very personal, autobiographical poems. There were so many enjoyable poems to choose from, so I have selected only a handful of the ones I loved. 

 

The collection opens with “The Figured Wheel,” a musing on time and humanity that is just gorgeous. 

 

The Figured Wheel

 

The figured wheel rolls through shopping malls and prisons

Over farms, small and immense, and the rotten little downtowns.

Covered with symbols, it mills everything alive and grinds

The remains of the dead in the cemeteries, in unmarked graves and oceans.

 

Sluiced by salt water and fresh, by pure and contaminated rivers,

By snow and sand, it separates and recombines all droplets and grains,

Even the infinite sub-atomic particles crushed under the illustrated,

Varying treads of its wide circumferential track.

 

Spraying flecks of tar and molten rock it rumbles

Through the Antarctic station of American sailors and technicians,

And shakes the floors and windows of whorehouses for diggers and smelters

From Bethany, Pennsylvania to a practically nameless, semi-penal New Town

 

In the mineral-rich tundra of the Soviet northernmost settlements.

Artists illuminate it with pictures and incised mottoes

Taken from the Ten Thousand Stories and the Register of True Dramas.

They hang it with colored ribbons and with bells of many pitches.

 

With paints and chisels and moving lights they record

On its rotating surface the elegant and terrifying doings

Of the inhabitants of the Hundred Pantheons of major Gods

Disposed in iconographic stations at hub, spoke and concentric bands,

 

And also the grotesque demi-Gods, Hopi gargoyles and Ibo dryads.

They cover it with wind-chimes and electronic instruments

That vibrate as it rolls to make an all-but-unthinkable music,

So that the wheel hums and rings as it turns through the births of stars

 

And through the dead-world of bomb, fireblast and fallout

Where only a few doomed races of insects fumble in the smoking grasses.

It is Jesus oblivious to hurt turning to give words to the unrighteous,

And is also Gogol's feeding pig that without knowing it eats a baby chick

 

And goes on feeding. It is the empty armor of My Cid, clattering

Into the arrows of the credulous unbelievers, a metal suit

Like the lost astronaut revolving with his useless umbilicus

Through the cold streams, neither energy nor matter, that agitate

 

The cold, cyclical dark, turning and returning.

Even in the scorched and frozen world of the dead after the holocaust

The wheel as it turns goes on accreting ornaments.

Scientists and artists festoon it from the grave with brilliant

 

Toys and messages, jokes and zodiacs, tragedies conceived

From among the dreams of the unemployed and the pampered,

The listless and the tortured. It is hung with devices

By dead masters who have survived by reducing themselves magically

 

To tiny organisms, to wisps of matter, crumbs of soil,

Bits of dry skin, microscopic flakes, which is why they are called "great",

In their humility that goes on celebrating the turning

Of the wheel as it rolls unrelentingly over

 

A cow plodding through car-traffic on a street in Iasi,

And over the haunts of Robert Pinsky's mother and father

And wife and children and his sweet self

Which he hereby unwillingly and inexpertly gives up, because it is

 

There, figured and pre-figured in the nothing-transfiguring wheel.

 

There are a number of interesting things in this poem. First, it displays Pinsky’s characteristic use of enjambment - the breaking of sentences across not just lines but stanzas. This is a technique he uses in Inferno as well, and I think he has a particularly skilled approach to it. The breaks are meaningful, not just there to preserve the stanza. 

 

I also love how he enfolds so much in this poem. It’s scope is global and historical, contains both the tiny flakes of skin and the vast universe, the personal and the mythological. 

 

That ending line is wonderful too, using three meanings of “figured” to represent the past, present, and future. The term “figured” thus comes to mean a unity of time as well as inscribed meaning on the wheel of time itself. I love this poem. 

 

This next poem is one of quite a few written in three-line stanzas. One wonders if Pinsky found this form so compelling that he decided to tackle the terza rima of Inferno just for the technical fun. 

 

But the form isn’t the main point. Back in 1999, I visited Dachau, the infamous Nazi concentration camp, and it had a profound effect on me. Pinsky, in this poem, describes his own experience visiting the Krakow camp, as a Jew and as a poet. 

 

The Unseen

 

In Krakow it rained, the stone arcades and cobbles

And the smoky air all soaked one penetrating color

While in an Art Nouveau cafe, on harp-shaped chairs,

 

We sat making up our minds to tour the death camp.

As we drove there the next morning past farms

And steaming wooden villages, the rain had stopped

 

Though the sky was still gray. A young guide explained

Everything we saw in her tender, hectoring English:

The low brick barracks; the heaped-up meticulous

 

Mountains of shoes, toothbrushes, hair; one cell

Where the Pope had prayed and placed flowers; logbooks,

Photographs, latrines - the whole unswallowable

 

Menu of immensities. It began drizzling again,

And the way we paused to open or close the umbrellas,

Hers and ours, as we went from one building to the next,

 

Had a formal, dwindled feeling. We felt bored

And at the same time like screaming Biblical phrases:

I am poured out like water; Thine is the day and

 

Thine also the night; I cannot look to see

My own right hand . . . I remembered a sleep-time game,

A willed dream I had never thought of by day before:

 

I am there; and granted the single power of invisibility,

Roaming the camp at will. At first I savor my mastery

Slowly by creating small phantom diversions,

 

Then kill kill kill kill, a detailed and strangely

Passionless inward movie: I push the man holding

The crystals down from the gas chamber roof, bludgeon

 

The pet collie of the Commandant’s children

And in the end flush everything with a vague flood

Of fire and blood as I drift on toward sleep

 

In a blurred finale, like our tour’s - eddying

In a downpour past the preserved gallows where

The Allies hung the Commandant, in 1947.

 

I don’t feel changed, or even informed - in that,

It’s like any other historical monument; although

It is true that I don’t ever at night anymore

 

Prowl rows of red buildings unseen, doing

Justice like an angry god to escape insomnia. And so,

O discredited Lord of Hosts, your servant gapes

 

Obediently to swallow various doings of us, the most

Capable of all your former creatures - we have 

No shape, we are poured out like water, but still

 

We try to take in what won’t be turned from in despair:

As if, just as we turned toward the fumbled drama

Of the religious art shop window to accuse you

 

Yet again, you were to slit open your read heart

To show us at last the secret of your day and also,

Because it also is yours, of your night. 

 

Just let that one pour over you, in all its horror and profundity. 

 

The next one is quite a bit less heavy, one of several short poems with miniature pictures of a moment in life. 

 

Ralegh’s Prizes

 

And Summer turns her head with its dark tangle

All the way toward us; and the trees are heavy,

With little sprays of limp green maple and linden

Adhering after a rainstorm to the sidewalk

Where yellow pollen dries in pools and runnels.

 

Along the oceanfront, pink neon at dusk:

The long, late dusk, a light wind from the water

Lifting a girl’s hair forward against her cheek

And swaying a chain of bulbs.

                In luminous booths,

The bright, traditional wheel is on its ratchet,

And ticking gaily at its little pawl;

And the surf revolves; and passing cars and people,

Their brilliant colors - all strange and hopeful as Ralegh’s 

Trophies: the balsam, the prizes of untried virtue,

Bananas and armadillos that a Captain

Carries his Monarch from another world.

 

I should also include one of the autobiographical poems. This one contains a delightful panoply of colorful characters from Pinsky’s childhood. Enjoy.

 

The Questions

 

What about the people who came to my father’s office

For hearing aids and glasses - chatting with him sometimes

 

A few extra minutes while I swept up in the back,

Addressed packages, cleaned the machines; if he was busy

 

I might sell them batteries, or tend to their questions:

The tall overloud man with a tilted, ironic smirk

 

To cover the gaps in his hearing; a woman who hummed one

Prolonged note constantly, we called her “the hummer” - how

 

Could her white fat husband (he looked like Rev. Peale)

Bear hearing it day and night? And others: a coquettish old lady

 

In a bandeau, a European. She worked for refugees who ran

Gift shops or booths on the boardwalk in the summer;

 

She must have lived in winter on Social Security. One man

Always greeted my father in Masonic gestures and codes.

 

Why do I want them to be treated tenderly by the world, now

Long after they must have slipped from it one way or another,

 

While I was dawdling through school at that moment - or driving,

Reading, talking to Ellen. Why this new superfluous caring?

 

I want for them not to have died in awful pain, friendless.

Though many of the living are starving, I still pray for these,

 

Dead, mostly anonymous (but Mr. Monk, Mrs. Rose Vogel)

And barely remembered: that they had a little extra, something

 

For pleasure, a good meal, a book or a decent television set.

Of whom do I pray this rubbery, low-class charity? I saw

 

An expert today, a nun - wearing a regular skirt and blouse,

But the hood or headdress navy and white around her plain

 

Probably Irish face, older than me by five or ten years.

The Post Office clerk told her he couldn’t break a twenty

 

So she got change next door and came back to send her package.

As I came out she was driving off - with an air, it seemed to me,

 

Of annoying, demure good cheer, as if the reasonableness

Of change, mail, cars, clothes was a pleasure in itself: veiled

 

And dumb like the girls I thought enjoyed the rules too much

In grade school. She might have been a grade school teacher;

 

But she reminded me of being there, aside from that - as a name

And person there, a Mary or John who learns that the janitor

 

Is Mr. Woodhouse; the principal is Mr. Ringleven; the secretary

In the office is Mrs. Apostolacos; the bus driver is Ray. 

 

Here is another outstanding story poems. The emotional content here is pretty amazing, particularly the last stanza, which I think reveals the uneasy dynamic of the child who wishes to become his own person, and the mother (or grandmother?) who is still ruled by her fears and perhaps trauma. 

 

A Woman

 

Thirty years ago: gulls keen in the blue,

Pigeons mumble on the sidewalk, and an old, fearful woman

Takes a child on a long walk, stopping at the market

 

To order a chicken, the child forming a sharp memory 

Of sawdust, small curls of droppings, the imbecile

Panic of the chickens, their affronted glare.

 

They walk in the wind along the ocean: at first,

Past cold zinc railings and booths and arcades

Still shuttered in March; then, along high bluffs

 

In the sun, the coarse grass combed steadily

By a gusting wind that draws a line of tears

Toward the boy’s temples as he looks downward,

 

At the loud combers booming over the jetties,

Rushing and in measured rhythm receding on the beach.

He leans over. Everything that the woman says is a warning,

 

Or a superstition; even the scant landmarks are like

Tokens of risk or rash judgment - drowning,

Sexual assault, fatal or crippling diseases:

 

The monotonous surf; wooden houses mostly boarded up;

Fishermen with heavy lines cast in the surf;

Bright tidal pools stirred to flashing

 

From among the jetties by the tireless salty wind.

She dreams frequently of horror and catastrophe - 

Mourners, hospitals, and once, a whole family

 

Sitting in chairs in her own room, corpse-gray, 

With throats cut; who were they? Vivid,

The awful lips of the wounds in the exposed necks,

 

Herself helpless in the dream, desperate,

At a loss what to do next, pots seething

And boiling over onto their burners, in her kitchen.

 

They have walked all the way out past the last bluffs,

As far as Port-Au-Peck - the name a misapprehension 

Of something Indian that might mean “mouth”

 

Or “flat” or “bluefish,” or all three: Ocean

On the right, and the brackish wide inlet

Of the river on the left; and in between,

 

Houses and landings and the one low road

With its ineffectual sea-wall of rocks

That the child walks, and that hurricanes 

 

Send waves crashing over the top of, river

And ocean coming violently together

In a house-cracking exhilaration of water.

 

In Port-Au-Peck the old woman has a prescription filled,

And buys him a milk-shake. Pouring the last froth

From the steel shaker into his glass, he happens

 

To think about the previous Halloween:

Holding her hand, watching the parade

In his chaps, boots, guns and sombrero.

 

A hay-wagon of older children in cowboy gear

Trundled by, the strangers inviting him up

To ride along for the six blocks to the beach - 

 

Her holding him back with both arms, crying herself,

Frightened at his force, and he vowing never,

Never to forgive her, not as long as he lived. 

 

I should at least mention the title poem, a long musing on love and life and filled with fleeting memories of childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. It is far too long to quote, but definitely a highlight of this collection.

 

I’ll end with this one, another somber poem, but one that leaves a serene impression. The narrator has come to peace with death, with the cycle of living and dying and rebirth. 

 

Dying

 

Nothing to be said about it, and everything-

The change of changes, closer or further away:

The Golden Retriever next door, Gussie, is dead,

 

Like Sandy, the Cocker Spaniel from three door down

Who died when I was small; and every day

Things that were in my memory fade and die.

 

Phrases die out; first, everyone forgets

What doornails are; then after certain decades

As a dead metaphor, "dead as a doornail" flickers

 

And fades away. But someone I know is dying-

And though one might say glibly, "everyone is,"

The different pace makes the difference absolute.

 

The tiny invisible spores in the air we breathe,

That settle harmlessly on our drinking water

And on our skin, happen to come together

 

With certain conditions on the forest floor,

Or even a shady corner of the lawn-

And overnight the flashy, pale stalks gather,

 

The colorless growth without a leaf or flower;

And around the stalks, the summer grass keeps growing

With steady pressure, like the insistent whiskers

 

That grow between shaves on a face, the nails

Growing and dying from the toes and fingers

At their own humble pace, oblivious

 

As the nerveless moths, that live their night or two-

Though like a moth a bright soul keeps on beating,

Bored and impatient in the monster's mouth.

 

If you haven’t yet discovered Robert Pinsky, he is one of my favorite living poets. It is worth seeking out one of his collections.