“When I had no lover, I courted my sleep.”
Thanks to the marvels of the internet, I’ve just tracked down a poem that I have wanted to re-read since sophomore year of college. I remembered only the name, "Samurai Song," and the venue, The New Yorker . Granted, having known those two things, it wouldn’t have been all that hard to find. But in 1999 it wasn’t possible without the library, and then I forgot.
The poem is by Robert Pinsky. There is actually a YouTube video of Pinsky reading it.
I think I need to digest it for a little while. It doesn’t make my spine tingle as hard as it did when I first read it, it would have been on winter break, sophomore year. Was I recently single, or something? The bad-assedness of the poem appealed to me, like a tough-guy/tough-girl manifesto. The fragmentary line I most remembered was, "When I had no mother…" I’d forgotten the end over the years. And here it is:
"When I had no mother I embraced order."
What was it about that that got me? It seems to hard-boiled to have wanted at nineteen. On the other hand, I’d have been feeling it more freshly at that age, this absence of mother.
Whole poem here .
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