The Street

The overarching metaphor of “The Street” is the “thick / Vine,” which Pinsky says is covered in “red nervelets / Coiled at its tips” (Lines 2-3). A vine connotes both growth and connection. The main vine supports multiple flowers and leaves and spreads as it grows. The “red nervelets” (Line 2) suggest blossoms of flowers that represent individual people and their lives, connected to and fed by the vine.

The flower metaphor is complicated by Pinsky’s diction, comparing the people bound together as “Blisters on the vine” (Line 14). The people who live and work together, including the man who loses his wife to a wealthier lover, are “All riding the vegetable wave of the street” (Line 46). This suggests that the flowers on the vine are bound together in their mutual sorrow and helplessness. They are carried along with the vine as it grows, but they have no control over where it goes, or who it brings with it.

Pinsky compares the street to a vine, but he deviates from that comparison in the following passage:

Each August. As the powerful dragonlike

Hump swelled he rose cursing and ready

To throw his shoe—woven

Angular as a twig into the fabulous

Rug or brocade with crowns and camels,

Leopards and rosettes, (Lines 40-45).