Who wrote the poem "A Love of death"?

Imagine a child from Virginia or New Hampshire


Alone on the prairie eighty years ago


Or more, one afternoon—the shaggy pelt


Of grasses, for the first time in that child’s life,


Flowing for miles. Imagine the moving shadow


Of a cloud far off across that shadeless ocean,


The obliterating strangeness like a tide


That pulls or empties the bubble of the child’s


Imaginary heart. No hills, no trees.








The child’s heart lightens, tending like a bubble


Towards the currents of the grass and sky,


The pure potential of the clear blank spaces.








Or, imagine the child in a draw that holds a garden


Cupped from the limitless motion of the prairie,


Head resting against a pumpkin, in evening sun.


Ground-cherry bushes grow along the furrows,


The fruit red under its papery, moth-shaped sheath.


Grasshoppers tumble among the vines, as large


As dragons in the crumbs of pale dry earth.


The ground is warm to the child’s cheek, and the wind


Is a humming sound in the grass above the draw,


Rippling the shadows of the red-green blades.


The bubble of the child’s heart melts a little,


Because the quiet of that air and earth


Is like the shadow of a peaceful death—


Limitless and potential; a kind of space


Where one dissolves to become a part of something


Entire ... whether of sun and air, or goodness


And knowledge, it does not matter to the child.


Dissolved among the particles of the garden


Or into the motion of the grass and air,


Imagine the child happy to be a thing.








Imagine, then, that on that same wide prairie


Some people are threshing in the terrible heat


With horses and machines, cutting bands


And shoveling amid the clatter of the threshers,


The chaff in prickly clouds and the naked sun


Burning as if it could set the chaff on fire.


Imagine that the people are Swedes or Germans,


Some of them resting pressed against the strawstacks,


Trying to get the meager shade.


A man,


A tramp, comes laboring across the stubble


Like a mirage against that blank horizon,


Laboring in his torn shoes toward the tall


Mirage-like images of the tilted threshers


Clattering in the heat. Because the Swedes


Or Germans have no beer, or else because


They cannot speak his language properly,


Or for some reason one cannot imagine,


The man climbs up on a thresher and cuts bands


A minute or two, then waves to one of the people,


A young girl or a child, and jumps head-first


Into the sucking mouth of the machine,


Where he is wedged and beat and cut to pieces—


While the people shout and run in the clouds of chaff,


Like lost mirages on the pelt of prairie.








The obliterating strangeness and the spaces


Are as hard to imagine as the love of death ...


Which is the love of an entire strangeness,


The contagious blankness of a quiet plain.


Imagine that a man, who had seen a prairie,


Should write a poem about a Dark or Shadow


That seemed to be both his, and the prairie’s—as if


The shadow proved that he was not a man,


But something that lived in quiet, like the grass.


Imagine that the man who writes that poem,


Stunned by the loneliness of that wide pelt,


Should prove to himself that he was like a shadow


Or like an animal living in the dark.


In the dark proof he finds in his poem, the man


Might come to think of himself as the very prairie,


The sod itself, not lonely, and immune to death.








None of this happens precisely as I try


To imagine that it does, in the empty plains,


And yet it happens in the imagination


Of part of the country: not in any place


More than another, on the map, but rather


Like a place, where you and I have never been


And need to try to imagine—place like a prairie


Where immigrants, in the obliterating strangeness,


Thirst for the wide contagion of the shadow


Or prairie—where you and I, with our other ways,


More like the cities or the hills or trees,


Less like the clear blank spaces with their potential,


Are like strangers in a place we must imagine.

Who wrote the poem "A Love of death"?
Robert Pinsky of course.. Have you read this one??





At Pleasure Bay In the willows along the river at Pleasure BayA catbird singing, never the same phrase twice.Here under the pines a little off the roadIn 1927 the Chief of PoliceAnd Mrs. W. killed themselves together,Sitting in a roadster. Ancient unshaken pilingsAnd underwater chunks of still-mortared brickIn shapes like bits of puzzle strew the bottomWhere the landing was for Price's Hotel and Theater.And here's where boats blew two blasts for the keeperTo shunt the iron swing-bridge. He leaned on the gearsLike a skipper in the hut that housed the worksAnd the bridge moaned and turned on its middle pierTo let them through. In the middle of the summerTwo or three cars might wait for the iron trussworkWinching aside, with maybe a child to noticeA name on the stern in black-and-gold on white,Sandpiper, Patsy Ann, Do Not Disturb,The Idler. If a boat was running whiskey,The bridge clanged shut behind it as it passedAnd opened up again for the Coast Guard cutterSlowly as a sundial, and always jammed halfway.The roadbed whole, but opened like a switch,The river pulling and coursing between the piers.Never the same phrase twice, the catbird fillingThe humid August evening near the inletWith borrowed music that he melds and changes.Dragonflies and sandflies, frogs in the rushes, two bodiesNot moving in the open car among the pines,A sliver of story. The tenor at Price's Hotel,In clown costume, unfurls the sorrow gatheredIn ruffles at his throat and cuffs, high quaversThat hold like splashes of light on the dark water,The aria's closing phrases, changed and fading.And after a gap of quiet, cheers and applauseAudible in the houses across the river,Some in the audience weeping as if they had meltedInside the music. Never the same. In BerlinThe daughter of an English lord, in loveWith Adolf Hitler, whom she has met. She is takingPossession of the apartment of a couple,Elderly well-off Jews. They survive the warTo settle here in the Bay, the old ladyTeaches piano, but the whole world swivelsAnd gapes at their feet as the girl and a high-up NaziExamine the furniture, the glass, the pictures,The elegant story that was theirs and nowIs part of hers. A few months later the EnglishEnter the war and she shoots herself in a park,An addled, upper-class girl, her life that passesInto the lives of others or into a place.The taking of lives--the Chief and Mrs. W.Took theirs to stay together, as local ghosts.Last flurries of kisses, the revolver's barrel,Shivers of a story that a child might hearAnd half remember, voices in the rushes,A singing in the willows. From across the river,Faint quavers of music, the same phrase twice and again,Ranging and building. Over the high new bridgeThe flashing of traffic homeward from the racetrack,With one boat chugging under the arches, outwardUnnoticed through Pleasure Bay to the open sea.Here's where the people stood to watch the theaterBurn on the water. All that night the fireboatsKept playing their spouts of water into the blaze.In the morning, smoking pilasters and beams.Black smell of char for weeks, the ruin alreadySoaking back into the river. After you dieYou hover near the ceiling above your bodyAnd watch the mourners awhile. A few days moreYou float above the heads of the ones you knewAnd watch them through a twilight. As it grows darkerYou wander off and find your way to the riverAnd wade across. On the other side, night air,Willows, the smell of the river, and a massOf sleeping bodies all along the bank,A kind of singing from among the rushesCalling you further forward in the dark.You lie down and embrace one body, the limbsHeavy with sleep reach eagerly up around youAnd you make love until your soul brims upAnd burns free out of you and shifts and spillsDown over into that other body, and youForget the life you had and begin againOn the same crossing--maybe as a child who passesThrough the same place. But never the same way twice.Here in the daylight, the catbird in the willows,The new café, with a terrace and a landing,Frogs in the cattails where the swing-bridge was--Here's where you might have slipped across the waterWhen you were only a presence, at Pleasure Bay. Robert Pinsky
Reply:its really deep.


i love it.


i write poems too, and so do most of my friends, so i've seen alot and believe me....you got soemthing.
Reply:ya that is a good poem
Reply:Robert Pinsky
Reply:Pinsky. :)



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