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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=507851" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>At Pleasure Bay</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">In the willows along the river at Pleasure Bay<br>A catbird singing, never the same phrase twice.<br>Here under the pines a little off the road<br>In 1927 the Chief of Police<br>And Mrs. W. killed themselves together,<br>Sitting in a roadster. Ancient unshaken pilings<br>And underwater chunks of still-mortared brick<br>In shapes like bits of puzzle strew the bottom<br>Where the landing was for Price's Hotel and Theater.<br>And here's where boats blew two blasts for the keeper<br>To shunt the iron swing-bridge. He leaned on the gears<br>Like a skipper in the hut that housed the works<br>And the bridge moaned and turned on its middle pier<br>To let them through. In the middle of the summer<br>Two or three cars might wait for the iron trusswork<br>Winching aside, with maybe a child to notice<br>A name on the stern in black-and-gold on white,<br>Sandpiper, Patsy Ann, Do Not Disturb,<br>The Idler. If a boat was running whiskey,<br>The bridge clanged shut behind it as it passed<br>And opened up again for the Coast Guard cutter<br>Slowly as a sundial, and always jammed halfway.<br>The roadbed whole, but opened like a switch,<br>The river pulling and coursing between the piers.<br>Never the same phrase twice, the catbird filling<br>The humid August evening near the inlet<br>With borrowed music that he melds and changes.<br>Dragonflies and sandflies, frogs in the rushes, two bodies<br>Not moving in the open car among the pines,<br>A sliver of story. The tenor at Price's Hotel,<br>In clown costume, unfurls the sorrow gathered<br>In ruffles at his throat and cuffs, high quavers<br>That hold like splashes of light on the dark water,<br>The aria's closing phrases, changed and fading.<br>And after a gap of quiet, cheers and applause<br>Audible in the houses across the river,<br>Some in the audience weeping as if they had melted<br>Inside the music. Never the same. In Berlin<br>The daughter of an English lord, in love<br>With Adolf Hitler, whom she has met. She is taking<br>Possession of the apartment of a couple,<br>Elderly well-off Jews. They survive the war<br>To settle here in the Bay, the old lady<br>Teaches piano, but the whole world swivels<br>And gapes at their feet as the girl and a high-up Nazi<br>Examine the furniture, the glass, the pictures,<br>The elegant story that was theirs and now<br>Is part of hers. A few months later the English<br>Enter the war and she shoots herself in a park,<br>An addled, upper-class girl, her life that passes<br>Into the lives of others or into a place.<br>The taking of lives--the Chief and Mrs. W.<br>Took theirs to stay together, as local ghosts.<br>Last flurries of kisses, the revolver's barrel,<br>Shivers of a story that a child might hear<br>And half remember, voices in the rushes,<br>A singing in the willows. From across the river,<br>Faint quavers of music, the same phrase twice and again,<br>Ranging and building. Over the high new bridge<br>The flashing of traffic homeward from the racetrack,<br>With one boat chugging under the arches, outward<br>Unnoticed through Pleasure Bay to the open sea.<br>Here's where the people stood to watch the theater<br>Burn on the water. All that night the fireboats<br>Kept playing their spouts of water into the blaze.<br>In the morning, smoking pilasters and beams.<br>Black smell of char for weeks, the ruin already<br>Soaking back into the river. After you die<br>You hover near the ceiling above your body<br>And watch the mourners awhile. A few days more<br>You float above the heads of the ones you knew<br>And watch them through a twilight. As it grows darker<br>You wander off and find your way to the river<br>And wade across. On the other side, night air,<br>Willows, the smell of the river, and a mass<br>Of sleeping bodies all along the bank,<br>A kind of singing from among the rushes<br>Calling you further forward in the dark.<br>You lie down and embrace one body, the limbs<br>Heavy with sleep reach eagerly up around you<br>And you make love until your soul brims up<br>And burns free out of you and shifts and spills<br>Down over into that other body, and you<br>Forget the life you had and begin again<br>On the same crossing--maybe as a child who passes<br>Through the same place. But never the same way twice.<br>Here in the daylight, the catbird in the willows,<br>The new caf&eacute;, with a terrace and a landing,<br>Frogs in the cattails where the swing-bridge was--<br>Here's where you might have slipped across the water<br>When you were only a presence, at Pleasure Bay.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Robert+Pinsky">Robert Pinsky</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=507851" data-title="At Pleasure Bay de Robert Pinsky" data-description="In the willows along the river at Pleasure Bay
A catbird singing, never the same phrase twice.
Here under the pines a little off the road
In 1927 the Chief of Police
And Mrs. W. killed themselves together,
Sitting in a roadster. Ancient unshaken p..."></div>
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