I order POETRY, & read that poem with some relish. :)
KS
On 15/02/07, Frederick Pollack <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Poetry Daily: Albert Goldbarth, To Be Read in 500 Years
>
>
> To Be Read in 500 Years
> To think of today ... and the ages continued henceforward.
> -Walt Whitman
>
> She bring me love love love love, crazy love.
> -Van Morrison
>
>
>
> If they're right, the whizkid physicist-theorist thinktank guys,
> suggesting that every acted-on decision of ours produces a brachiation
> in the timestream (therefore, two simultaneous independent futures:
> for example, one extending from my use of "brachiation,"
> one extending from my almost-use of "fork," so that
> tomorrow-"b" and tomorrow-"f" are equally real in parallel
> and coexistent tracks), there may be, secretly among us,
> a few-or even entire populations-of backward travelers
> in time from not just one, but many, "alternamorrows,"
> so different from ourselves, it's like the thought that bitch-ho' rap
> and the sublimities of, say, Chopin are kin enough to both be
> reproduced by variant patterns within the same 88 keys:
> in one
> of these futures, everything essential, every attribute of humanness
> even minimally desirable, is relegated to mind alone
> -we look like cumulonimboid dendrite-structures
> that have flowered out of small deflated flesh-pods-
> and the reproductive function of the species now
> is entirely exocorporal, a matter of frozen protein combinations
> and gestation-sacs of complex bioplastic;
> in another
> of these futures-it's an after-we-squander-the-oil-deposits world
> of post-apocalyptic, bare-subsistence living-a day
> is a matter of thinning, granular soil: leached,
> defiant of yielding to our human need and its desperate threshing
> -that, and a rumor from over up north that dog troops
> of marauding goons are on the march with pillage and worse
> asquirm in their eyes-and there, and then, all softness,
> all of anything without "survival value," has been bred out
> of the race, so "interpersonal relationship" is no more
> than a reflex of the genes;
> or, au contraire,
> another future makes an ornate, public fetish of the wooing game
> -a codified fantasia of modes of address and rank and dowry
> and clan and feather-on-cloak-by-depth-of-genealogy, etc.-
> to a social architecture of such overmuch extent that, while it's all
> intensely focused on the establishing of a betrothal-pair, it's
> all at the same time so bound up in duty and cultural sanction
> as to be even more devoid of anything personal-anything soulful
> and open to flutter-than the future I've described
> of petro-aftershock ...
> and therefore none of these baffled representatives
> encamped in our twenty-first century can understand,
> can "get," the thump, the cupid-zing, the woe and the wow,
> in our songs and poems, especially the songs, especially the glowing
> uranium dump that malingers all night at the bottom of the blues,
> oh especially the blues, especially let her light shine down
> on me, especially by the waters of Misery Avenue, let's not forget
> Heartbreak Hotel, let's not eschew its transient cast
> of cinders-and-ashes clientele, but also the songs of tra-la-la
> and marital abidingness, of how sometimes a body fits a body
> as indivisibly as waves (or it could be particles) fit light, the poems
> address this too of course, the let me count the ways, the roses
> in their fragrant and meaty botanical abundance, and the doves,
> let's not forget the doves, the old thou art a summer's day
> and thy breasts are of wheaten beauty, let's not dillydally
> in recognizing
> the wedding under the laws of God, let's not exempt the quickie
> under the snooker table, the flame in the bones, the one name
> drummed
> in a bruising tattoo on the heartskin, they don't comprehend this
> sugartit thing,
> this sonnet thing, this sky held in the mirror pools
> of the Taj Mahal on a day of slowly promenading couples
> thing, these people of the future as I've imagined them don't have
> the apparatus of leisure we've had, in a special lotus of time
> that's been vouchsafed to us, a mythos, a sequestering in which
> this serotonin and this opium are grown to a lyric degree, they
> wouldn't
> understand me sneaking out at 5 AM to pat that ten-dollar valentine
> tenderly into place beneath the wiper-blade of Phyllis's swayback
> Dodge
> (with the fishtaily brakes and the fanlight crack in the windshield),
> they
> don't know the drive-in, the down at the corner, the boardwalk,
> the bridge,
> the places where it happens and where we commemorate it,
> also a night
> of blind and driven howling I pulled like an hours-long ebony scarf
> from the deeps of my brainstem once on Morgan's lawn, so sweet
> it is, this ineluctable thing, this please let one of the harder sciences
> objectify
> the biochemical basis of our here-do-that-to-my-earlobe-another-time
> thing, down by the riverside, at the gates, behind the stadium,
> and Skyler my wife with the basement tiles and cowboy pajamas,
> she lift me up, she bring me the dominions of the morning
> and the thrones of the moon, they've never once experienced this
> impossible night of her wanting him down to the vitamins
> and the pepsin and the aura and the spit, and how she bring him
> the molasses and the escrow and the skidmarks and the holy church,
> the rock and the water, the star and the stain, together we heard
> the otherworld hosannas of wind in the alders, not to mention
> karaoke screech, the Gregorian chant and the triple-x rebel yowl,
> it requires a certain coddled recipe of history and maybe economics
> for this psychic condition, this giddiyap of the hormones
> and the industry they generate, the castles and the sly decolletage,
> I wanted to read her the works of Montaigne and Cervantes
> and Emerson
> and I wanted to slip her some tongue, I was enrolled, I stayed
> the course from my first day in Agony 101 to my post-doc,
> they will never
> be burned by this ice, they will die without knowing the thirst
> in this river, she bring me the spackle, she give me the flying tackle,
> he build her up, he tug her plug and she drains, she becomes
> a puddle of ouch, she hit me with the hoodoo, with the magic spell
> and the candle, they will never know this candle, yeah
> she lead me up the towpath got a diamond in my nose, she dress
> in ermine and sable, she barefoot in the grass, I tossed,
> I thought of words like chivalrous and serenity, I spied on her,
> I wanted to kill for her, she bring me the cherry wine, the toxic waste,
> the whole wheat and the half-shell, they will never eat of this fruit
> and suffer its consequences, never beg for its juice, its family root,
> she be my guide, she interlocutor, my Beatrice-and-Virgil
> (and me behind
> in my Dante sandals following her shake-that-thing on the stony path),
> my rash, my silty unguent, she rob him, she rock and throb him,
> she greet him in his guise as the charioteer of the sun in its vast
> celestial passage, in the centuries forthcoming they will never know
> this honeycomb of confusion and its confected delight, it happens
> in the jazz bar, at the casbah, in the synagogue, under the sheets,
> she lift me higher, she be my desire, she build me, she give me,
> in the sand dunes, hot hot summer, on the roof, yes here, now here,
> a little lower, she feed me, she give me, she lift me, she need me,
> the sound of the continents as they first tore apart and the surge of
> the oceans,
> the music of that, the songs especially but also the poems, she take me,
> the rosins of craving, the tables of lust in its periodicity, they cannot
> and cannot and cannot partake of this feast and the terrible emptiness
> that follows, she make me, she lift me, I freely give her one grand
> opera rose
> and hiphop dove, she under my skin, she knife in my mind,
> this thing,
> oh this millennial and hallucinatory and radiant thing, she bring me,
> she lift me, she take me, she bring me love
> love love love crazy love.
>
>
> Albert Goldbarth
> POETRY
> February 2007
>
>
>
>
>
> Copyright (c) 2007 by The Poetry Foundation
> All rights reserved.
> Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
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