Impossible To Tell
to Robert Hass and in memory of Elliot Gilbert
Slow dulcimer, gavotte and bow, in autumn,
Bashõ and his friends go out to view the moon;
In summer, gasoline rainbow in the gutter,
The secret courtesy that courses like ichor
Through the old form of the rude, full-scale joke,
Impossible to tell in writing. "Bashõ"
He named himself, "Banana Tree": banana
After the plant some grateful students gave him,
Maybe in appreciation of his guidance
Threading a long night through the rules and channels
Of their collaborative linking-poem
Scored in their teacher's heart: live, rigid, fluid
Like passages etched in a microscopic cicuit.
Elliot had in his memory so many jokes
They seemed to breed like microbes in a culture
Inside his brain, one so much making another
It was impossible to tell them all:
In the court-culture of jokes, a top banana.
Imagine a court of one: the queen a young mother,
Unhappy, alone all day with her firstborn child
And her new baby in a squalid apartment
Of too few rooms, a different race from her neighbors.
She tells the child she's going to kill herself.
She broods, she rages. Hoping to distract her,
The child cuts capers, he sings, he does imitations
Of different people in the building, he jokes,
He feels if he keeps her alive until the father
Gets home from work, they'll be okay till morning.
It's laughter versus the bedroom and the pills.
What is he in his efforts but a courtier?
Impossible to tell his whole delusion.
In the first months when I had moved back East
From California and had to leave a message
On Bob's machine, I used to make a habit
Of telling the tape a joke; and part-way through,
I would pretend that I forgot the punchline,
Or make believe that I was interrupted--
As though he'd be so eager to hear the end
He'd have to call me back. The joke was Elliot's,
More often than not. The doctors made the blunder
That killed him some time later that same year.
One day when I got home I found a message
On my machine from Bob. He had a story
About two rabbis, one of them tall, one short,
One day while walking along the street together
They see the corpse of a Chinese man before them,
And Bob said, sorry, he forgot the rest.
Of course he thought that his joke was a dummy,
Impossible to tell--a dead-end challenge.
But here it is, as Elliot told it to me:
The dead man's widow came to the rabbis weeping,
Begging them, if they could, to resurrect him.
Shocked, the tall rabbi said absolutely not.
But the short rabbi told her to bring the body
Into the study house, and ordered the shutters
Closed so the room was night-dark. Then he prayed
Over the body, chanting a secret blessing
Out of Kabala. "Arise and breathe," he shouted;
But nothing happened. The body lay still. So then
The little rabbi called for hundreds of candles
And danced around the body, chanting and praying
In Hebrew, then Yiddish, then Aramaic. He prayed
In Turkish and Egyptian and Old Galician
For nearly three hours, leaping about the coffin
In the candlelight so that his tiny black shoes
Seemed not to touch the floor. With one last prayer
Sobbed in the Spanish of before the Inquisition
He stopped, exhausted, and looked in the dead man's face.
Panting, he raised both arms in a mystic gesture
And said, "Arise and breathe!" And still the body
Lay as before. Impossible to tell
In words how Elliot's eyebrows flailed and snorted
Like shaggy mammoths as--the Chinese widow
Granting permission--the little rabbi sang
The blessing for performing a circumcision
And removed the dead man's foreskin, chanting blessings
In Finnish and Swahili, and bathed the corpse
From head to foot, and with a final prayer
In Babylonian, gasping with exhaustion,
He seized the dead man's head and kissed the lips
And dropped it again and leaping back commanded,
"Arise and breathe!" The corpse lay still as ever.
At this, as when Bashõ's disciples wind
Along the curving spine that links the renga
Across the different voices, each one adding
A transformation according to the rules
Of stasis and repetition, all in order
And yet impossible to tell beforehand,
Elliot changes for the punchline: the wee
Rabbi, still panting, like a startled boxer,
Looks at the dead one, then up at all those watching,
A kind of Mel Brooks gesture: "Hoo boy!" he says,
"Now that's what I call really dead." O mortal
Powers and princes of earth, and you immortal
Lords of the underground and afterlife,
Jehovah, Raa, Bol-Morah, Hecate, Pluto,
What has a brilliant, living soul to do with
Your harps and fires and boats, your bric-a-brac
And troughs of smoking blood? Provincial stinkers,
Our languages don't touch you, you're like that mother
Whose small child entertained her to beg her life.
Possibly he grew up to be the tall rabbi,
The one who washed his hands of all those capers
Right at the outset. Or maybe he became
The author of these lines, a one-man renga
The one for whom it seems to be impossible
To tell a story straight. It was a routine
Procedure. When it was finished the physicians
Told Sandra and the kids it had succeeded,
But Elliot wouldn't wake up for maybe an hour,
They should go eat. The two of them loved to bicker
In a way that on his side went back to Yiddish,
On Sandra's to some Sicilian dialect.
He used to scold her endlessly for smoking.
When she got back from dinner with their children
The doctors had to tell them about the mistake.
Oh swirling petals, falling leaves! The movement
Of linking renga coursing from moment to moment
Is meaning, Bob says in his Haiku book.
Oh swirling petals, all living things are contingent,
Falling leaves, and transient, and they suffer.
But the Universal is the goal of jokes,
Especially certain ethnic jokes, which taper
Down through the swirling funnel of tongues and gestures
Toward their preposterous Ithaca. There's one
A journalist told me. He heard it while a hero
Of the South African freedom movement was speaking
To elderly Jews. The speaker's own right arm
Had been blown off by right-wing letter-bombers.
He told his listeners they had to cast their ballots
For the ANC--a group the old Jews feared
As "in with the Arabs." But they started weeping
As the old one-armed fighter told them their country
Needed them to vote for what was right, their vote
Could make a country their children could return to
From London and Chicago. The moved old people
Applauded wildly, and the speaker's friend
Whispered to the journalist, "It's the Belgian Army
Joke come to life." I wish I could tell it
To Elliot. In the Belgian Army, the feud
Between the Flemings and Walloons grew vicious,
So out of hand the army could barely function.
Finally one commander assembled his men
In one great room, to deal with things directly.
They stood before him at attention. "All Flemings,"
He ordered, "to the left wall." Half the men
Clustered to the left. "Now all Walloons," he ordered,
"Move to the right." An equal number crowded
Against the right wall. Only one man remained
At attention in the middle: "What are you, soldier?"
Saluting, the man said, "Sir, I am a Belgian."
"Why, that's astonishing, Corporal--what's your name?"
Saluting again, "Rabinowitz," he answered:
A joke that seems at first to be a story
About the Jews. But as the renga describes
Religious meaning by moving in drifting petals
And brittle leaves that touch and die and suffer
The changing winds that riffle the gutter swirl,
So in the joke, just under the raucous music
Of Fleming, Jew, Walloon, a courtly allegiance
Moves to the dulcimer, gavotte and bow,
Over the banana tree the moon in autumn--
Allegiance to a state impossible to tell.
Literary Analysis
This literary analysis was generated with AI and may contain interpretive differences. Provide your analysis in the comments section.
Summary
Robert Pinsky's poem moves by association rather than by straight narrative, gathering jokes, memories, and cultural references into a meditation on friendship, loss, and the strange way meaning survives in performance. The poem begins with Basho and the linked-poem tradition of renga, then slips into remembered stories about a beloved friend, Elliot Gilbert, whose wit and memory seem almost inexhaustible. From there, the poem widens into a personal scene of crisis involving a mother and child, then into anecdotes about phone messages, failed punchlines, and a doctor's mistake that led to Elliot's death. What links these episodes is not plot but a felt logic of responsiveness: one voice answering another, one story opening into another, each trying to keep faith with the dead and with the living impulse behind laughter.
The central tension is between what can be told and what cannot be fully carried into words. Pinsky keeps returning to jokes that depend on timing, gesture, and shared context, suggesting that humor is a social art that resists neat transcription. At the same time, the poem insists that this very instability is a form of allegiance: to friends, to language, to the dead, and to the moving life of the mind. By the end, the linked materials of Japanese poetic form, Jewish joke-telling, and political anecdote all converge in the image of a "courtly allegiance" that is larger than any single identity. The poem does not resolve grief or explain humor away; instead, it shows that memory itself may work like a renga, advancing through connection, interruption, and surprise.
Theme
- Friendship and mourning - The poem is shaped by memory of Elliot Gilbert, and its jokes, stories, and digressions become a way of keeping him present after death.
- Language as performance - Pinsky treats jokes and poems as events that depend on voice, timing, and shared understanding, not just on printed words.
- Interconnection of cultures - Japanese poetic form, Jewish humor, and political anecdote are woven together to show how meaning travels across traditions.
- Grief transformed by wit - Humor does not erase sorrow here; it becomes one of the few tools capable of carrying sorrow without reducing it.
- Uncertainty and incompleteness - The repeated sense that a story is impossible to tell cleanly reflects the limits of explanation and the partial nature of memory.
- Allegiance and loyalty - Beneath the comedy and the references, the poem honors forms of attachment: to friends, to family, to community, and to art.
Literary Devices
- Allusion - The poem draws on Basho, renga, the Kabbalah, and political history, creating a layered network of references that deepens its reflections on form and meaning.
- Free verse - The loosely flowing lineation mimics the poem's associative movement, allowing memory and anecdote to unfold in a conversational, improvisational way.
- Extended metaphor - Linked-poem structure becomes a model for human connection, joke structure, and the passage of thought from one voice to another.
- Digression - The poem deliberately wanders through stories and recollections, and that wandering enacts the difficulty of telling grief and humor directly.
- Repetition - Variations on "impossible to tell" and recurring references to jokes and linking forms reinforce the poem's concern with transmission and retelling.
- Cataloguing - Lists of languages, figures, and cultural names create a dense texture that suggests abundance, complexity, and the impossibility of total closure.
- Irony - The poem often contrasts lofty language with comic material, showing how solemnity and absurdity can coexist in the same emotional space.
- Apostrophe - The direct address to dead or absent figures gives the poem urgency and grief, as if speech itself were trying to bridge loss.
Symbolism
- Basho's linked-poem tradition - It symbolizes poetry as collaboration, sequence, and responsiveness, a form that depends on relation rather than isolation.
- The joke - The joke stands for communal knowledge, timing, and the life of language that survives only when shared aloud.
- The telephone message - It symbolizes delayed contact and the fragile attempt to connect with a friend across distance and absence.
- The dead body - It represents the final limit of human wit and ritual, the point at which language meets irrecoverable loss.
- The moon - Recurring moon imagery suggests reflection, continuity, and the quiet persistence of aesthetic attention across time.
- Falling leaves - The leaves evoke transience, mortality, and the seasonal movement that parallels human contingency.
Tone
Pinsky's tone is affectionate, erudite, and rueful, with flashes of comedy that never cancel the poem's sadness. He sounds admiring when remembering Elliot's intelligence and humor, but also reflective and chastened as he circles back to death, mistake, and grief. For the reader, the mood shifts between liveliness and elegy: the poem feels playful in its anecdotes and sudden turns, yet underneath that energy is a steady awareness of fragility, loss, and the limits of what can be preserved in words.
Historical Context
Robert Pinsky is known for poetry that blends intellectual range with conversational energy, often bringing together literary tradition, personal memory, and public life. This poem reflects his interest in formal exchange and in the way poems can move between cultural registers without losing emotional force. Its engagement with Basho and renga places it in conversation with Japanese linked-verse traditions, while its attention to Jewish joking and storytelling connects it to a long modern American fascination with ethnic humor, identity, and performance.
The poem also sits within a broader late twentieth-century poetic environment in which many writers resisted narrow lyric solitude and instead treated form as relational and historically aware. By linking classical Japanese poetics, Jewish comic tradition, and contemporary political anecdote, Pinsky shows how modern poetry can become a site where traditions meet, argue, and illuminate one another.
Similar Poems
- The Dream Songs - John Berryman
- Ariel - Sylvia Plath
- My Papa's Waltz - Theodore Roethke
- Yehuda Halevi - H. Leivick
- The Waking - Theodore Roethke