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Frontmatter -- Contents -- I. The Time Of Year, The Time Of Day -- Poem About People -- The Time Of Year, The Time Of Day -- Ceremony For Any Beginning -- Waiting -- December Blues -- Discretions Of Alcibiades -- Tennis -- II. Sadness And Happiness -- Sadness And Happiness -- III. Persons -- To My Father -- Old Woman -- Library Scene -- First Early Mornings Together -- The Sentences -- Daughter -- The Personal Devil -- Spelunker -- The Generation Before -- IV. The Street Of Furthest Memory -- The Street Of Furthest Memory -- Long Branch, New Jersey -- Doctor Frolic -- Pleasure Pier -- The Destruction Of Long Branch -- The Beach Women -- V. Essay On Psychiatrists -- Essay On Psychiatrists From Sadness and Happiness: Poems by Robert Pinsky:CEREMONY FOR ANY BEGINNING Robert Pinsky ? Against weather, and the randomHarpies--mood, circumstance, the lawsOf biography, chance, physics--The unseasonable soul holds forth,Eager for form as a renownedPedant, the emperor's man of worth,Hereditary arbiter of manners. Soul, one's life is one's enemy.As the small children learn, what happensTakes over, and what you were goes away.They learn it in sardonic softComments of the weather, when it sharpensThe hard surfaces of daylight: lightWinds, vague in direction, like blades Lavishing their brilliant strokesAll over a wrecked house,The nude wallpaper and the bruteIntelligence of the torn pipes.Therefore when you marry or buildPray to be untrue to the plainDominance of your own weather, how it keeps Going even in the woods when notA soul is there, and how it impliesAlways that separate, coldSplendidness, uncouth and unkind--On chilly, unclouded mornings,Torrential sunlight and moist air,Leafage and solid bark breathing the mist
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