Day 22 - Antique by Robert Pinsky

Faded photographs.  We keep these as memories.  When no one is left to remember you, what then?  A discarded photograph in an antique frame, a face lost in a second hand store of trinkets.  What is of value then, the frame?  How easily we can become forgotten.

Robert Pinsky (1940 - ) won't be forgotten.  His legacy will live on forever in his poems and prose and plays.  If you didn't know what Robert Pinsky looked like...if you found his photograph in a frame at a stall, and really liked the frame, would it matter how famous he was?  Would the person looking at his picture know that he wrote poems, that he loved jazz, that he played the saxiphone, that he won numerous awards? Funny, how all that is lost in a single discarded photograph.

Here is my spoken version of this poem:
https://soundcloud.com/raindrop-11/antique

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Antique - by Robert Pinsky

I drowned in the fire of having you, I burned
In the river of not having you, we lived
Together for hours in a house of a thousand rooms
And we were parted for a thousand years.
Ten minutes ago we raised our children who cover
The earth and have forgotten that we existed.
It was not maya, it was not a ladder to perfection,
It was this cold sunlight falling on this warm earth.

When I turned you went to Hell. When your ship
Fled the battle I followed you and lost the world
Without regret but with stormy recriminations.
Someday far down that corridor of horror the future
Someone who buys this picture of you for the frame
At a stall in a dwindled city will study your face
And decide to harbor it for a little while longer
From the waters of anonymity, the acids of breath.

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I thought it might be interesting to hear Robert Pinsky himself speaking this poem with a background of his favourite music Jazz:

http://www.bu.edu/today/2010/speaking-jazz/

Here is more from Robert Pinsky:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_w3XpNOTGw