Three Poems by Albert Goldbarth

Three Poems: Albert Goldbarth

“In the poem ‘The Names’ by Billy Collins, On page 125, em dashes in lines 14, 23, 37, and 40 were mistakenly printed as question marks.”

—errata slip in The Poets Laureate Anthology published by W. W. Norton

The needle gets poked in my eyeball and the fluid—the cure, the maybe cure—is injected into the macula, and then fingers get crossed. That’s why, when the ocular specialist explains it at the initial consultation, a nurse stands awkwardly in the doorway: she’s a witness. In case it comes to court, she’ll say that nothing was guaranteed. They do their best to halt the leaking spidershape of blood and yet

they don’t know—any more than on another floor the oncologist knows, or the meteorologist knows, or the presidential election pollster, or the bookie, it’s all a calculus determined by dice of antimatter. The groom-to-be is out with his buddies, stupefied and slurring and staring into the pitcher of beer as if it’s a crystal ball (but trust me, it’s not).

The bride-to-be is consulting Gwen,

who’s steadily eating a hole through husband number four and so her crazy guesses count as credentialed. And my eye

is dozing the day away at the tip of its nerve-rich stalk and waiting. To this extent, I have to admire the accidental honesty in those typos that appear in four lines of “The Names”; they say that anything we think we know, we don’t know. And I wouldn’t wish Billy Collins a botched anthology appearance, but the snowflake is sure of its pure, six-sided body and the Canadian goose is drawn along its migratory path without a doubt or fluctuation (and without a self-awareness in which “a doubt” exists as a concept), while

we’re not sure what becomes of our uneaten rolls in the plastic restaurant basket; or who in the realm of global data-power decides what the White House decides on the following day; or where the hummingbirds come from (they’re just here, somehow, jeweled tuning forks at our flowers, but does anybody ever see them flying, like crows, like starlings?); or what the feel of the amniotic fluid was like against our fetal senses; or how we know we’re going to die but still get out of bed in the morning. Keats

doesn’t have a final clarity to offer, or Yeats, or Rita Dove, or Dickinson. And still, they’re unashamed of this, they get out of bed

in the morning and sing their suppositions away, as beautifully as language will allow. Yes, don’t the greatest works—think Hamlet—(or, as Norton’s Poets Laureate Anthology might publish it, ??think Hamlet??) admit, forthrightly, uncorrected, all of the endless question marks that plague our human vision.

The Model

feels—or anyway thinks she feels—their brushes licking away at her skin, some hesitantly and shyly, and some too driven to halt, the way it must have been when the herds surrounded Lot’s wife, avid for salt.

ALBERT GOLDBARTH

Brief: A Survey

Cardinal Marcello Cervini, who was elected Pope, served for less than one month, from April 9 to May 1, 1555.

—Stephen Greenblatt

“Pope for a Month”—it sounds like one more cheap reality TV program; you know, just like “90-Day Fiancée” and the rest, or especially the formative “Queen for a Day” from the 1950s (based on the earlier radio show), where the daily winner out of three competing aspirants was selected for sharing the most compelling misery (my youngest daughter has polio; my husband bears three insufficient break-his-spirit jobs and crawls home every night like a mouse escaped from the cat’s jaws; oh, and the landlord is showily tapping his watch) and, while the other two contestants’ miseries were publicly implied to be second-rate (for which they needed to publicly smile and applaud the winner), the winner received a fancy costume crown, a lavish bouquet of flowers worthy of the Kentucky Derby, one of the program’s sponsor’s washer-dryers, and maybe something like a check for a thousand 1950s dollars (delivered the size of a middling tablecloth), the glittery favor and fortune of which would last her only about as long as Marcello Cervini served as the Pope. Some reigned in their popish gold brocade for decades, yes, but any Vatican history should include those confusing stretches of time

when Popes turned over like generations of fruit flies in a gilded jar.

“Brief”—what’s the metric for “brief”? Today my city’s obit page includes one listing longer than the life it lists, May 7 2022 – May 11 2022, and you can imagine as well as I the background story with the details scored in psychological suffering sized to the scale of Jupiter’s orbit around the sun. By that standard, how long was playwright Christopher Marlowe’s sister’s life, who—in a time of different “age of consent” than ours—was married at twelve and died at thirteen in childbirth? Jorge Gomez, once the Chief Financial Officer at Moderna (the Covid vaccine manufacturer) enjoyed that position “for just one day, following an internal investigation” (but left with a full year’s salary, $700,000). Not a reality TV show, but reality: “One-Month President”: William Henry Harrison served for only thirty-one days. One thinks of the wax undoing Icarus’s wing-feathers in a fingersnap. Or my friends—the Colonoscopy King for a Day, the Mammogram Queen for a Day and a Follow-up Full Year in that horrible clinical spotlight—you can find their stories in other poems of mine and, under different names, in the poems of hundreds of others. As for my recent prostate reduction surgery. . . . I’m seventy-five, an honorable age, but when the anesthetist enters the room with his oblivion toolkit ready,

ALBERT GOLDBARTH

you see that everybody is granted life on this planet all too briefly.

Do you remember the Book-of-the-Month Club?

“One-Month Book.” That started it all, and now there’s Wine-of-the-Month, and Cheese-, and Bible-, and Chocolate-, and Thong Panty-. Reminding us: everything this side of atoms has its shelf life. Of some poets I admire, Larry Levis, Lucia Perillo, Tony Hoagland, Tom Lux, William Matthews . . . their work is still under copyright, but their bodies have entered the public domain. They were quicker at that than the rest of us, but we’re joining them all the same: as you know, the common accepted wisdom is our bodies lose and replace their cells at such a rate that every seven years we’re completely new beings. They wheeled me briskly into the surgery room and darkened my mind and inserted their micro snippers and clippers robotically up my penis and into the mess of me, and when I “came to,” the imposing Conclave of Cardinals in charge of my ongoingness convened, with all of their rigmarole and panoply, and cast their votes a few inconclusive times until finally consensus was reached, and the white smoke that announces this decision took shape, and it rose up in a great plume in the air.