3 Poems
Albert Goldbarth
Albert Goldbarth has been publishing notable poetry collections for half a century, two of which have received the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the most recent of which are Other Worlds (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021) and Everybody (Lynx House Press, 2022). He is also the author of a novel (Pieces of Payne, Graywolf Press) and six collections of essays, and has appeared in hundreds of journals, from Clown War and Kayak to The New Yorker and Poetry. He lives in Wichita, Kansas with his wife Skyler and his legendary collection of 1950s space toys. Photo credit: Michael Pointer
In the yellow fall of wattage
Some men are never freshly shaved,
yet never bearded. Waking up in the morning,
making love or pining over love not made,
at the office, in church, at the races,
wherever…they’re stubbled; stubbled eternally.
It’s like the pencils
my father used, fussing his account books
for the company every night in our basement.
I never saw one whole and new,
I never saw one worn to the point of uselessness.
It was always a stub,
hard-working in the yellow fall of wattage.
Maybe the stars are that. They aren’t
the original, bodiless Big Bang field of energy.
But they’re not yet a nova or black hole.
They’re like…they’re like stubble,
radiant stubble up there. It’s late;
my father sighs, and lightly runs a hand over his jaw.
spectrum
One species. And yet infinite
diversification. / Somehow, as if normal expectation
didn’t count, the convent’s new novitiate is dead
of cancer at twenty-one; the sleep-around druggie
lives to be eighty-nine. / Two brothers, the priest
and the chump-level hatchet man for the mob: both
raised in the same house, by the same fraught woman.
/ One light, as it exits a prism.
—————
I’m thinking of that land I visited: there,
the sun spills over the rim of the Earth
at dawn with eager anticipation;
but drive for an hour, and it doesn’t crest
the mountains in the north until it’s finally
perfected its poker face. One light,
but so many understandings. Shining
on the communion chalice. Shining on the crack pipe.
ASTONISHMENT
She’s photographed this thousands of times,
the damp wad as it wriggles out
of its casing and nascently opens wings
the vibrant yellow of Buddhist monk robes
—but the astonishment never pales.
For her partner, the astonishment
is the camera, its almost NASA-quality
lens, and the rest of her toolkit’s
gizmos and gadgetries, and their long,
unthinkable journey to here in a shipping container.
Astonishment too, in the moment she comes home from a shoot
and wriggles out of her mucked-up jeans, the lean flanks
of her body on her way to the shower
providing the light from their hallway window
a brief chance to collaborate with her skin.
All that, examples of Goldbarth’s Primary Law
of Thermodynamics: Energy
has an infinite number of Matter costumes
available in her closet, and she wears them
with promiscuous delight.
