Two Poems: Albert Goldbarth
The Song of the Needle
He said he knew a woman in Sedalia, Missouri, who had stepped on a needle as a girl and nine years later the needle worked out of the thigh of her third child.
—Charles Portis, in True Grit
Some instances are credible. The poet Charles Wright once said to a group of us that he knew a woman whose body accepted a sliver of glass that traveled for years—for years—across the great striated hummocks of muscle and through the inland sea we call our blood, a sort of small Old Testament wandering in the wilderness, and undergoing diminishment as of a pencil blunting itself in use; and then one day exited, worn to something more essential and more beautiful now, the way that rocks are rounded smooth by their slo-mo centuries-tumble in the ocean. I can believe that understanding of “return.” But . . . over generations? over species? across the line between human
and god? There’s a video (gone viral) of Deshant Adhikari, sixteen, from Nepal, who was born with a hairy tail 28 inches long at his coccyx. “No medical effort could stop the tail from growing. Local priests say the boy could be a reincarnation of the Lord
Hanuman, the monkey God.” Last week my sister visited from out of town (“Kid, it’s been years!”) and necessarily part of our conversation wasn’t words but sidelong peeks to see who looks the most like our father, the most like our mother, as if their faces might ascend and float inside our faces, the way I’ve heard sometimes the dead—the drowned—have slowly been let go of by the bottom, and their faces arrive at the surface changed but, even so, recognizable.
Also the annual count of lost dogs showing up a day or a decade later, scratching their old familiar code at the side door; also the keys, the lockets, the wallets, as determinedly back as the pigeons from San Capistrano, the eels, the thousand-mile orange wheel
of Monarch butterflies. (Although there’s also the woman whose wedding ring was found after thirty-three years in St. Aubin’s Bay, New Jersey. “Throw it back please,” she said to the disappointed metal detectorist, having originally flung it into the waves herself. “I never want to see it again.”)
“The remains of a structure that predates even Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids” yielded to an archeology dig and is back in the everyday above-ground light of the Czech Republic, with animal bones, stone tools, and pottery fragments scattered around it like punctuation. The magician returns
from her sojourn in a locked box, and the P.O.W. steps out after five years in a worse locked box and melts in his mother’s embrace. The bonhomie of those repatriated Nigerian hardwood gods.
The bees, returned with news of pollen. And Lazarus Lazarus! Watching his electrifying reanimation must have been as drop-to-your-knees as witnessing a lumberyard reconvert to its forest.
And the snows come back—as their other self, the silver twill of drizzle.
Surely then, it’s no surprise that Charles Wright has traveled along the underside of this poem,
unseen, has traveled its glitches and ligatures and emerges now, reciting from the first page of his book from 2000, Negative Blue: “I’m back here again. . . . / Looking to see what adds up.”
It’s no surprise to me that my sister makes a last-minute appearance, holding onto that needle from the Charles Portis epigraph—it’s threaded now, and after its terra incognita journey it’s stitching this whole thing closed, O elephant’s fabled memory, O ever-returning
Barbarossa and Jesus and King Arthur (and some say JFK and Elvis too),
O cicadas, Halley’s Comet periodicity, O déjà vu.
Of Two Minds
The being of goo. The one with bug antennae on its head that can extend like bungee cord, and so conduct the frizz of atomic charge. The one of light—its body (make that “body”) is only and totally light, although in there somewhere a sly intelligence enough to conquer outposts of the Space Patrol is simmering in photon-I.Q.-units. So exorbitant a throng of these by now, in Star Force, Mission X, Infinity Explorers, they seem less alien than the portly man who’s walking home for dinner, walking home to wife and toddler son, who stops to flick a smeary fall of ashflake from his uniform: another of the nuisances he bears as Commander of Death Camp 3.
There are marriage vows that soberly say they will make, of two, one body. But with sex and kids and money, there’s enough to feel riven about. And then there’s Szalman’s story from his family, about the uncle who went to fight the Germans in the second World War: “Confusing. He was German too.” He came back home to America after the fires of hell had played with him like a toy—like a doll in a furnace. But he was young still, strong, and country-bumpkin handsome, and he made a happily uneventful life
for himself and his family as a door-to-door repairman, and it was only after a fall from a roof-high ladder in his sixtieth year that the hospital found a grain of German shrapnel in his brain. For forty years, he’d carried a second head in his head: a wounded him. Szalman showed me the X-ray once, that had come down to him in his uncle’s effects: a great gray cloud, with an intricate web of electrical crackle flowering over its surface, like those stunning Hubble photographs of a galaxy forming. Although we could also see it as the beauty of an orchid.
“I was,” says Wallace Stevens in his blackbird poem, “of two minds.”
The seed of this poem was Rae and Dale squabbling in a restaurant. I couldn’t hear, but saw enough to understand the ferocity of their opposition. The marriage vows, no matter how thorough, aren’t a physics manual and never include that matter and antimatter explode upon contact.
And even so, I’ve sat in their living room when the child cried out mysteriously on the second floor (in pain?) and, whhht, the two of them ran up the stairs as one.
Children. We can never be too careful. It’s raining cats and dogs, stay inside. It’s getting dark out, be careful.
ALBERT GOLDBARTH
I’m thinking of a child so loved (or over-loved) his father has raised him as if the downiest feather floating out of the sky might carry a germ of harm. And yet it’s acceptable that the boy is out playing at soldiers-and-tanks as the ash from the ovens across the compound begins to descend. That’s everyday life in Death Camp 3. That’s everyday life and its regular weather: corpses and sunshine, corpses and dew.
And the being of seven feathery heads that bud from its body in seven serial stages: one head drops away like a withered leaf, then a new one appears. The being that’s basically jaws and belly and anus held together by a weird prismatic mist. The one that “speaks” by emitting colored gas. So many. And are they any stranger than what we find in liver-red and char-black on the cave walls of our ancestors? . . . the man-body one with the head of a stag, the woman-circle one with the beak of a bird. All over the Paleolithic, people seem to be admitting, or arguing with, or slipping out of, or blossoming into, their animal halves. We’ve seen it so often, those primally powerful images have almost become like the international symbols we find on airport bathrooms and traffic plaques. Beast-One versus Reason-One. Emotion-One marrying Strategy-One. I saw it this week, in Rae and Dale —trapped in themselves, in a restaurant booth. I loved them then, these friends of mine:
a hand of anger hammering air; its counterpointing glare of glacial theorizing. How readily they were translated into figures the future will recognize. How easily they were everyone.