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POETRYETC Home

POETRYETC  February 2007

POETRYETC February 2007

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Subject:

Re: Poems by Others: delightful Valentine's Day poem by Albert Goldbarth. (Whose work I've always liked.)

From:

kasper salonen <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and poetics <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Thu, 15 Feb 2007 23:29:46 +0200

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text/plain

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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.
>
>             REMEMBER TO SUPPORT POETRY DAILY'S GENEROUS SPONSORS...
>             Sponsor PD!
>
>
>             HOME | Today's Poem | Poetry Daily - The Book! | News, Reviews & Special Features | Archive | Bookstore
>             Free Email Newsletter | Sponsor PD! | Support PD! | Friends of PD | Contact Us | About PD
>
>             Copyright (c) 1997-2007 The Daily Poetry Association
>
>
>

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