Revisionary

by Robert Pinsky

The globe on a tilted axis means The News.
As the icon spins the angle seems to shift.

Science has found ancestral Neanderthals.
We have a bit of their blood. They painted caves
Better than sapiens, as we named ourselves.

History has found the Jews who fought for Hitler.
Thousands of Part and what were called Full Jews.
A few were generals.
                                      As the globe revolves

Different mixes keep passing into the light
Or into the dark, and then back out again:
The unexpected, over and over again.

Jefferson’s July 2 draft blamed George III
For violating the liberty of “a People
Who never offended him” shipped off to be
“Slaves in another hemisphere.” For many
“Miserable death in transportation thither.”
On the Fourth of July, that passage was left out. Thither.

In draft after draft of Puddn’head Wilson Twain
Linked and tore apart stories: The conjoined twins
From Italy come to town. In that same town, two
Blue-eyed babies. The nursemaid fair-skinned Roxy
Secretly swops the babies cradle to cradle,
Different nightie to nightie and fate to fate.
The one is her son. He sells her down the river.

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Saturday morning, mid winters chill, the measure is about 12 degrees Fahrenheit.  I heard bird song after exiting the car for the short walk to Starbucks.  The morning sunrise was spectacular, unimpeded by clouds.

The poem by Robert Pinsky is a meditation upon the stories that we tell one another.  Stories are a means of indwelling “the thing” that we call life.  The same story can be told variously.  There’s much that is untold in the initial version. The News is the initial, the official version.  It is easy to overlook “the tilt”.  The tilt is the substrate of every story — underneath every telling is the inclined axis around which the world turns.

What is this paradox, the untold, that snaps our attention to something we’d never think?  It remains for someone else present around the fire of civilization, to add to the story, a revision of the magnificent-terror-called-life.  There’s the wobble.  What have I missed?  “Different mixes keep passing into the light, Or into the dark, and then back out again.”

Two days ago, late Thursday afternoon I drove pass a group of young adult women, gathered around a utility pole alongside Fabyan Parkway.  A white cross was attached to the pole.  Upon the ground, arranged around the pole bunches of fresh flowers lent a note of life, to a makeshift memorial to the end of a life.  Yesterday I returned to the commemoration site by the busy roadway where life and death are portrayed in paradox.  The story was of a well loved, young adult male, Brian, and his prized red Mustang.

At one side of the utility pole was a debris field of scattered plastic, broken automobile grill and trim parts.

Our axis is tilted, the world turns.