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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Pinsky
Robert Pinsky
Born in New Jersey, in 1940, Robert Pinsky is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Gulf Music: Poems, and has served as the U.S. Poet Laureate from 1997 to 2000...
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FURTHER READING
Related Prose
Grammar for Poets
by Michael Ryan
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First Things to Hand  
by Robert Pinsky

In the skull kept on the desk.
In the spider-pod in the dust.

Or nowhere. In milkmaids, in loaves,
Or nowhere. And if Socrates leaves

His house in the morning,
When he returns in the evening

He will find Socrates waiting
On the doorstep. Buddha the stick

You use to clear the path,
And Buddha the dog-doo you flick

Away with it, nowhere or in each
Several thing you touch:

The dollar bill, the button
That works the television.

Even in the joke, the three
Words American men say

After making love. Where’s
The remote? In the tears

In things, proximate, intimate.
In the wired stem with root

And leaf nowhere of this lamp:
Brass base, aura of illumination,

Enlightenment, shade of grief.
Odor of the lamp, brazen.

The mind waiting in the mind
As in the first thing to hand.




"First Things to Hand" first appeared in First Things to Hand, published by Sarabande Books, 2006 © Robert Pinsky.
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