POETRY FRIDAY

When I was still doing my residency in grad school, I used to do some extra work for a professor who was the treasurer of an esteemed literary society. I used to handle the mailings for collecting dues and input payments in the database...real thrillsville.

Until one day...my eyes caught the mailing label for "Robert Pinsky" in my pile of "to send".

You would have thought I was a teenager and he, a rock star.

I'm sending a letter to a Poet Laureate! I have done business with the man who has done a brilliant translation of Dante's Inferno!"

I was so giddy the professor I worked with finally rolled his eyes and groaned:

"He's just a man!"

To which I blurted out:

"And yet so few like him!"

That earned me a month of proofreading, down in the farthest depths of the library's bowels, the entries of a terminology encyclopedia that was about to be published ...

Anyway, that's my ex-US Poet Laureate story.
We used to live in the same town, you know.

I think this is a delightful poem. I love how he compares the TV to Hermes, an archetypal trickster. I also like how he finds magic and myth in the so-called "ordinary".


To Television
-Robert Pinsky

Not a "window on the world"
But as we call you,
A box a tube

Terrarium of dreams and wonders.
Coffer of shades, ordained
Cotillion of phosphors
Or liquid crystal

Homey miracle, tub
Of acquiescence, vein of defiance.
Your patron in the pantheon would be Hermes

Raster dance,
Quick one, little thief, escort
Of the dying and comfort of the sick,

In a blue glow my father and little sister sat
Snuggled in one chair watching you
Their wife and mother was sick in the head
I scorned you and them as I scorned so much

Now I like you best in a hotel room,
Maybe minutes
Before I have to face an audience: behind
The doors of the armoire, box
Within a box--Tom & Jerry, or also brilliant
And reassuring, Oprah Winfrey.

Thank you, for I watched, I watched
Sid Caesar speaking French and Japanese not
Through knowledge but imagination,
His quickness, and Thank You, I watched live
Jackie Robinson stealing

Home, the image--O strung shell--enduring
Fleeter than light like these words we
Remember in, they too winged
At the helmet and ankles.

Happy Friday, everyone!