I've been reading a lot of poetry lately...by Robert Pinsky, Donald Hall, Wallace Stevens, W.H. Auden, C.K. Williams, W.B. Yeats, Galway Kinnell, Robert Hass...and I have been just enjoying the quality of certain poems, the use of language, and the way some poems make me feel...I guess just enjoying the aesthetic quality and not so much concerning myself with interpretation. The poem I'm posted today is one that I enjoy for the reasons I posted above. The feeling of loss that it communicates and the use of language, such as the street being described as "glamorous and lost" and the "delicate ankles" of the woman...the sense of hopelessness and futility at the end when the sun is just "ordinary and final" and the sentences are "too flat for any poem"...maybe it's the stab of recognition when seeing someone you haven't seen in a long time and then the pain of the passing feeling as you realize the distance is too great between you and you are no longer friends, not even close enough to say hello on the street....

The Sentences by Robert Pinsky

Reading the sentences, November sun
Touching the avenues, offices, the station,
I saw you pass me on a street, your face
Was pink with cold, cold windows flashed, the stores
And cars were like--mythology--, the street
Itself was glamorous and lost, it was
As though I never knew you yet somehow knew
That this was you, a sentence interdicted
The present, it said, you never knew, you passed,
Leaves coppery and quick as lizards moved
Around your delicate ankles; November sun
Lay on the sidewalk, ordinary and final
As the sentences too flat for any poem.