ROBERT PINSKY
And what I have met wi th in life was the just punishment
Which reaches, sooner or later, the breaker of a taboo.
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One's sense of civilization doubtless is enhanced by having a dashing uncle,
who is a famous French poet and a diplomat, and who shows you Paris from
the inside. But for Czeslaw it was a stroke of Iuck to have Wilno as well. It
was a cosmopolitan city and an intelligent, alert person could not grow up
there without a sense of many cultures. There was a fruitful cultural collision
and blending and exchallging between Lithuanians and Jews. Wilno was a
good place from which to stand to behold the universe.
But that Wilno is gone. Wilno just popped into a recent poem of nune–
part of my ongoing effort to see the United States and our artifacts and my
life among them as historically as Eastern Europe or Florence. For the shop–
ping mall is as historical as Prague or Florence; it is equally the outcome of
thousands of years of human history, and, if we cannot detect that, it's due
to deficiencies in our equi pment of perception. Perhaps like Czeslaw, I sense
that everything in our world is a haunted ruin. The notion behind this poem
is that our bodies are haunted by all those unknown and known ancestors,
as is our language and our culture. And each thing is a ruin, because a lot of
it is unretrievable. In a sense a new car or nucrophone, if you could under–
stand it, is as much a haunted ruin as what looks like a haunted ruin.
Even your computer
IS
a haunted ruin, as your
Blood leaves something of itself, warming
The tool in your hand.
From far
ofT,
down the billion corridors
Of the semiconductor, mili tary
Pipes grieve at the junctures.
This too smells of the body, its heated
Polymers smell of breast milk
And worry-sweat.
Hum of so many cycles in current, voltage
Of the past. Sing, wires. Feel, hand. Eyes,
Watch and form
Legs and bellies of characters:
Beak and eye of A. Serpentine hiss
S of the foregoers, claw-tines.
