33rd & Kirkham

33rd & Kirkham

At the edge of the bed, at the edge of darkness
and the tempo of your breathing next to me,
a prelude begins, each watery note written in light.
Too soon, the air will brighten, and the light
will secure this room, will stipple the tide
etching rocks in the distance. Along the avenues,
the fog will begin to lift, the birds will scatter
from the hedges while the heart remains still
with doubt. And when you open your eyes,
at the end of your journey back to this world,
when you clasp my hand darkly in yours,
the cool palm's lines coarsely against my own,
the song will lie quietly in our throats.
And the light will resurrect our features, will ferry
the smile from our dreams while reminding us
that anything in this world is possible, that nothing is. . . .
The heart, silly in my chest, keeps discordant time.
Each and every minute fades to memory in such light.
C. Dale Young
The Second Person
Four Way Books

Waiting for the Barbarians

"Waiting for the Barbarians"
by Constantine Cavafy (1864-1933)
translated by Edmund Keeley*

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn't anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What laws can the senators make now?
Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating.
Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city's main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
replete with titles, with imposing names.
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
Why don't our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and they're bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people's faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.

And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.

So We'll Go No More A-Roving

"So we'll go no more a-roving"
by George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron (1788-1824)

So we'll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul outwears the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon.

Mary Jo Bang Comments:
The poem begins with “So . . . ” and ends with “moon.” Imbedded in every word, in every phonic echo, is the central subjectivity that says, “Too bad.” We’ll go no more, that’s the key element. This “no more” is the end of love, of youth, and ultimately the “no more” that comes at the end of life. The poem captures the cold, utterly without irony, punctum (i.e., piercing) of the simple lacerating fact that something, “it,” is over. “It” is at its end. We will go no more. This is the lyric pared down to its most essential: the heart’s longing and the moon’s inconstancy.

Like the wayward poet himself, Byron’s poems often strain against constraint. This one is no exception. The poem proceeds by way of a cascade of opposites: a-roving/loving (seeking versus the sine qua non of love, the steadfast remaining faithful); night/bright; sheath (contraction)/breath (expansion); breast (heaving)/rest (death). The poem ends with a chiasmic reversal of the beginning. The end-rhymes of lines one and three in the first stanza — a-roving/loving — are flipped and become, in the first and third lines of the third and last stanza, loving/a-roving. Each line undergoes some transformation. The moon/bright in line four of the first stanza becomes light/moon in the last line of the last stanza. And so the poem goes forward. Of the many reversals and inversions, all can be read as stand-ins for the reversal of fortune of a possible fractured twosome and/or the retirement of the pack of once-active rovers that makes up the “we.” Even the idea of night as the end and day as the beginning gets reversed. Now day is the ending. When night becomes day, we will go no more. We once did. We won’t any more.

It doesn’t make the poem any less poignant to know that “roving” in Byron’s back-in-the-day day meant sex. We’ll go no more because we are all worn out. That’s sad too. Although that kind of exhaustion is remediable. It seems to me the exhaustion in Byron’s poem is more than sex. Its note of resignation is too cutting. The central lyric dummy who speaks for all of us — that’s the lyric mode — doesn’t only speak for the sexed-up moments but for the ponderous click of a casket lid. And the moment of falling out of love. And the moment of letting go and giving up on the unrequited. We, women and men in all combinations of coupling, or even those who are facing late night post-coital estrangement, we are, all of us, all done-in. The poem may be a cautionary tale as well as a dirge. When we lay down our metaphoric scabbard and put to bed our metaphoric priasmic sword with no hope of rising again, then we truly are no more. We are over.

Regarding the persistence of the poem in popular music and literature, see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So,_we'll_go_no_more_a_roving. The Wikipedia article also refers to the poem’s possible sources, most convincingly the Scottish poem, “The Jolly Beggar,” published in 1776:

He took the lassie in his arms, and to bed he ran,
O hooly, hooly wi' me, Sir, ye'll waken our goodman!
And we'll go no more a roving
Sae late into the night,
And we'll gang nae mair a roving, boys,
Let the moon shine ne'er sae bright.
And we'll gang nae mair a roving.

About Mary Jo Bang:
Mary Jo Bang is the author of four previous books of poetry, including Louise in Love and The Eye Like a Strange Balloon. She’s been the recipient of numerous awards including a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation and a Hodder Award from Princeton University. She is on the permanent faculty at Washington
University where she is an Associate Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program

To His Coy Mistress

"To His Coy Mistress"
by Andrew Marvell (1621–1678)

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day;
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood;
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserv'd virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am'rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapp'd power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Pattiann Rogers Comments:
This poem is funny and frightening. It’s witty, light-hearted, and as serious as steel. It’s a sunflower in full bloom and an icy clutch at the heart. This is not a frivolous poem.

Even on a first read, it isn’t difficult to understand the poem’s ostensible focus--the speaker’s attempts to seduce the woman he wants.

First, the title, notice the “his.” Marvel has put a tiny step between himself and the speaker of the poem. Someone else spoke these words, not me, he implies. “Coy” suggests not adamant refusal on the part of the woman in the poem, but a slightly playful affect in her reluctance to engage in sex with the speaker. “Mistress,” in Marvell’s time, meant a sweetheart or a woman being courted.

In the first stanza, the speaker is being funny (always a good way to soften up a woman, assuming he’s genuinely amusing). If we had eternity, we could just hang-out together for as long as we wanted, he suggests, wildly exaggerating details of an endless courtship. “An hundred years should go to praise/Thine eyes...” Is she smiling? “Two hundred to adore each breast” “Thirty thousand to the rest.” Is she laughing?

“But at my back I always hear/ Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;” A sharp turn to reality begins the second stanza where shocking imagery of the future reinforces the speaker’s position that prolonged lingering is ridiculous. Dead within your marble vault, he tells her, “...worms shall try/ that long presevered virginity, /And your quaint honour turn to dust, /And into ashes all my lust:” Here lust seems almost beautiful, almost noble, compared with oblivion. Don’t talk about death! Her hands are over her ears.

His last appeal, the logical conclusion, comes in the final stanza. Now, while we are full of life and desire, “Let us roll all our strength and all/Our sweetness up into one ball,/And tear our pleasures with rough strife/Thorough the iron gates of life:” Many pages could be written, and most probably have been, about all the meanings and nuances present in those four lines.

Has he won over “his coy mistress”? He’s made his best case, and some would assert that it is the very best case ever made for the carpe diem theme. Life is brief. Seize the day. Is there a poem written in the voice of the coy mistress giving her side of this debate? There should be.

Perhaps fewer coy mistresses are around today, but this poem, being about vastly more than sexual seduction, has endured, regularly included in many anthologies. There are lines and phrases from it that are with us in contemporary work and in common discourse. One of my first English professors often said to our undergraduate class,“Had we but world enough, and time,” usually because class was ending and whatever discussion we were engaged in had to stop.

That phrase and variations of it have been used as the titles of a surprising number of books on a variety of subjects. Here are just a few: World Enough and Time: Successful Strategies for Resource Management; World Enough and Space-Time: Absolute versus Relational Theories of Space and Time; World Enough and Time: Conversations with Canadian Women at Midlife; Worlds Enough and Time: Explorations of Time in Science Fiction and Fantasy; The Memoirs of Aga Khan: World Enough and Time.

“But at my back I always hear/Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.” Google this one. I remember encountering it first as a teenager reading A Farewell to Arms. It has rung in my head ever since.“The grave’s a fine and private place,/But none, I think, do there embrace.” and “Though we cannot make our sun/Stand still, yet we will make him run.” are also familiar. Fine and Private Place is the title of an Ellery Queen mystery. T. S. Eliot uses phrases, often inverted or modified, from this poem all the way through “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

Phrases and lines from “To His Coy Mistress,” quoted so often in references to circumstances having nothing to do with sexual seduction, establish the universality of the poem’s essential themes and their reach beyond its ostensible focus. The seduction is merely the stage upon which Marvell presents the case for carpe diem, and he presents it magnificently.

How wonderful to have written a poem like this one that moves through generation after generation for nearly 400 years, influencing other work and thought, and maintaining its music, its energy, its significance, and its pure joy in its own being.

About Pattiann Rogers:
Pattiann Rogers has published 13 books; the most recent, Wayfare, appears from Penguin this spring, 2008. She received a Literary Award from the Lannan Foundation in 2005. She has two sons and three grandsons and lives with her husband in Colorado.

The New Colossus

"The New Colossus"
by Emma Lazarus (1849-1887)

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame,
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Todd Boss Comments:
Emma, Dear, let’s face it: As a poet, you were a sentimental amateur. You were pen-pals with Emerson, but you got good too late; you died at 37. So how, with this stirring little poem, did you manage to reinterpret one of the greatest monuments of the modern age?

I know that in 1883, when you wrote this poem, you were troubled by media reports of the plight of your fellow Jews in czarist Russia. You had exiles on your mind.

You had read of sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi and his monumental project: to create for America the awesome statue of a woman, modeled after the fallen Colossus of Rhodes, lifting a beacon high above her crowned head and the waters of the Atlantic, across which so many exiles had already come.

But a beacon to exiles was not what Bartholdi created, and her name is not “Mother of Exiles” as you call her. What today we refer to as the “Statue of Liberty” was christened “Liberty Enlightens the World” by Bartholdi, who, over dinner with a French activist friend in 1865, conceived of her as a way to signal a new age for his beloved France. In fact, the statue was positioned to gaze directly across the ocean upon France, where things were not so good, politically. In the 1870s, when Bartholdi worked hardest on designs and early models, she was forged as a vision for a France humiliated by Germany and ravaged by anarchy. Napoleon had fled to Versailles and Paris was still bloody with chaos and Communard reprisals.

Not only did you rename her, Emma, but you completely reframed her. Such is the colossal power of poetry, when it is given proper stature. Bartholdi saw a woman with a torch, raising a republican standard for France and a tyrannized Europe; but you saw her as a beacon for their disenfranchised. Her “beacon-hand” didn’t glow with “world-wide welcome” in Bartholdi’s conception, but with democratic enlightenment. Liberty wore the cloak of art, but her subtext was propagandist, the chains of tyranny broken at her feet. She was meant to illumine a way for the world, not an escape route from it.

And yet, to this day, we see her through your eyes, Emma Lazarus, and summon her with your words. Presidential candidates recite your lines in key speeches, and debates about immigration policy still take place half in and half out of the torchlight of a poem that turned a statue’s seaward gaze inland—rearticulating Liberty, and the psyche of a nation.

About Todd Boss:
Todd Boss is the Director of External Affairs at The Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis. His first book of poems, YELLOWROCKET, is due from W. W. Norton in November. Read (and hear) more of his poems at www.toddbosspoet.com.

The Highwayman

"The Highwayman"
by Alfred Noyes (1880-1958)

Part One

I
The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
The road was a ribbon of moonlight, over the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding –
Riding – riding –
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.

II
He'd a French cocked-hat on his forehead, a bunch of lace at his chin,
A coat of the claret velvet, and breeches of brown doe-skin;
They fitted with never a wrinkle: his boots were up to the thigh!
And he rode with a jewelled twinkle,
His pistol butts a-twinkle,
His rapier hilt a-twinkle, under the jewelled sky.

III
Over the cobbles he clattered and clashed in the dark inn-yard,
And he tapped with his whip on the shutters, but all was locked and barred;
He whistled a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there
But the landlord's black-eyed daughter,
Bess, the landlord's daughter,
Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.

IV
And dark in the old inn-yard a stable-wicket creaked
Where Tim the ostler listened; his face was white and peaked;
His eyes were hollows of madness, his hair like mouldy hay,
But he loved the landlord's daughter,
The landlord's red-lipped daughter,
Dumb as a dog he listened, and he heard the robber say –

V
"One kiss, my bonny sweetheart, I'm after a prize to-night,
But I shall be back with the yellow gold before the morning light;
Yet, if they press me sharply, and harry me through the day,
Then look for me by moonlight,
Watch for me by moonlight,
I'll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way."

VI
He rose upright in the stirrups; he scarce could reach her hand,
But she loosened her hair i' the casement! His face burnt like a brand
As the black cascade of perfume came tumbling over his breast;
And he kissed its waves in the moonlight,
(Oh, sweet black waves in the moonlight!)
Then he tugged at his rein in the moonlight, and galloped away to the West.

Part Two

I
He did not come in the dawning; he did not come at noon;
And out o' the tawny sunset, before the rise o' the moon,
When the road was a gipsy's ribbon, looping the purple moor,
A red-coat troop came marching –
Marching – marching –
King George's men came marching, up to the old inn-door.

II
They said no word to the landlord, they drank his ale instead,
But they gagged his daughter and bound her to the foot of her narrow bed;
Two of them knelt at her casement, with muskets at their side!
There was death at every window;
And hell at one dark window;
For Bess could see, through the casement, the road that he would ride.

III
They had tied her up to attention, with many a sniggering jest;
They bound a musket beside her, with the barrel beneath her breast!
"Now keep good watch!" and they kissed her. She heard the dead man say –
Look for me by moonlight;
Watch for me by moonlight;
I'll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way!

IV
She twisted her hands behind her; but all the knots held good!
She writhed her hands till here fingers were wet with sweat or blood!
They stretched and strained in the darkness, and the hours crawled by like years,
Till, now, on the stroke of midnight,
Cold, on the stroke of midnight,
The tip of one finger touched it! The trigger at least was hers!

V
The tip of one finger touched it; she strove no more for the rest!
Up, she stood up to attention, with the barrel beneath her breast,
She would not risk their hearing; she would not strive again;
For the road lay bare in the moonlight;
Blank and bare in the moonlight;
And the blood of her veins in the moonlight throbbed to her love's refrain.

VI
Tlot-tlot; tlot-tlot! Had they heard it? The horse-hoofs
ringing clear;
Tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot, in the distance? Were they deaf that they did
not hear?
Down the ribbon of moonlight, over the brow of the hill,
The highwayman came riding,
Riding, riding!
The red-coats looked to their priming! She stood up strait and still!

VII
Tlot-tlot, in the frosty silence! Tlot-tlot, in the echoing night!
Nearer he came and nearer! Her face was like a light!
Her eyes grew wide for a moment; she drew one last deep breath,
Then her finger moved in the moonlight,
Her musket shattered the moonlight,
Shattered her breast in the moonlight and warned him – with her death.

VIII
He turned; he spurred to the West; he did not know who stood
Bowed, with her head o'er the musket, drenched with her own red blood!
Not till the dawn he heard it, his face grew grey to hear
How Bess, the landlord's daughter,
The landlord's black-eyed daughter,
Had watched for her love in the moonlight, and died in the darkness there.

IX
Back, he spurred like a madman, shrieking a curse to the sky,
With the white road smoking behind him and his rapier brandished high!
Blood-red were his spurs i' the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat,
When they shot him down on the highway,
Down like a dog on the highway,
And he lay in his blood on the highway, with a bunch of lace at his throat.

* * * * * *

X
And still of a winter's night, they say, when the wind is in the trees,
When the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
When the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
A highwayman comes riding –
Riding – riding –
A highwayman comes riding, up to the old inn-door.

XI
Over the cobbles he clatters and clangs in the dark inn-yard,
And he taps with his whip on the shutters, but all is locked and barred;
He whistles a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there
But the landlord's black-eyed daughter,
Bess, the landlord's daughter,
Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.

Julianna Baggott Comments:
In sixth grade, my parents moved me from an inner-city public school – where I’d seen a teacher beaten by a student on a fire escape – to a rural Catholic school run by a small but seemingly self-governed order of Oblate nuns. The school was surrounded by fields which were mown by the nuns in full habit astride tractors. In general, the nuns had been raised on farms, but the order was stationed in France and so all of the nuns had spent their novitiate year in Paris. They whispered to each other in French, and wore long wooly habits and boxy wimples year-round. Their habits belled at the bottoms and it seemed like they floated instead of walked.

Here, I met a nun, whom I’ll call Sister L. T. She taught the weekly class in oration, my favorite class. She immediately entered me into speech contests, and, for the first one, she suggested I memorize and recite "The Highwayman" by Alfred Noyes.

At the time, I didn’t give her choice much thought. I loved the poem which is lusty and violent, and as I read it now, I’m stunned by how iconic the narrative has become. A love triangle, it’s implied that Tim the ostler has betrayed Bess and her lover out of the spite of unrequited love. Bess is held hostage by the red coats sado-masochistically – "They bound a musket beside her, with the barrel beneath her breast!" – while kissing her against her will, indicating rape. She struggles against the ropes enough to get a finger on the trigger to warn her lover at the cost of her own life. When her lover hears the news, he turns back to seek revenge and is shot like "a dog on the highway./ And he lay in his blood on the highway, with a bunch of lace at his throat."

I imagine myself as an eleven-year-old in a long plaid skirt with a white turtle neck, my big eyes and scrawny frame and my wild gestures and how, with that final line, I held my own fist to my throat and let the words hang dramatically in the air.

And, here, in the final stanza, the poem becomes a ghost story – the highwayman and Bess locked together forever.

This fall, I published a novel, The Slippery Map, under the pen name N.E. Bode, dedicated to the nuns in my life and it was appropriate that I stop at her school to do an author visit. She is now is the principal of Catholic school struggling to withstand a suburban exodus. She still wears a full habit and, in a quiet moment in her office, she told me that she wouldn’t have ever expected it, but that she and the other nuns are “counter-cultural” now. She organizes morning and afternoon drop-off and pick-up with a bullhorn strapped to her chest.

I brought up "The Highwayman" during my talk, and Sister, who was standing beside me, said, "That’s my favorite poem."

And why? At first I thought that it was because it’s such a dark view of the dangers of romantic love. Sister L. T. sacrificed romantic love and so, one could say, this poem confirms that she made a wise decision.

But that didn’t seem right. It was too narrow and mean-spirited a reading and doesn’t fit the woman that I know and admire.

And so I turned to the poem again. It's the story of a woman who fell in love with a thief, but not just any thief. He’s a highwayman, which means he steals from those wealthy enough ride the highways, and he's hunted by the authorities who are corrupt and villainous. In this way, he is uplifted, if not sharing some Christ-like traits. And Bess, she loves him. It is a true love, but never consummated. He asks for a kiss, but he can scarcely reach her hand. She lets down her hair instead. When an Oblate nun takes her final vows, she dresses like a bride and the ritual is much like that of a wedding. In fact, she is called a bride of Jesus. Bess is ready to sacrifice her life for him and she does so, without hesitation. Sister, too, has given her life to Jesus, and that love – true and rich and deep – doesn’t end in death. That love goes on forever – as does the ghostly ending of this poem.

This poem has gone out of fashion – with its heavy rhythms and loud rhymes and its shared cadence with such poems as "'Twas The Night Before Christmas." But it’s a rich, dark, and haunting tale – and especially violent, sexually explicit and counter cultural for its era. Those who can see beyond its cocked hat and breeches will find a poem that feels good to read aloud – in the mouth and the chest. In fact, I suggest you do just that: read it aloud and, at the perfect moment, raise your fist to your throat.

About Julianna Baggott:
Julianna Baggott is the author of three collections of poetry, including Lizzie Borden in Love and Compulsions of Silkworms and Bees. She teaches at Florida State University’s Creative Writing Program. You can visit her at www.juliannabaggott.com.

Birthday

Now that the time remaining is insubstantial,
I need to review my history while asking
What exactly it suggests I've lived for,
What pleasures or duties, what moods
Of brief elation or extended calm.

To expect a meaning deeper than that,
To believe in a purpose beyond my own
Furthered by me all along without my knowing,
Is to warm myself at a fire painted on canvas.

If I want the company of the nonexistent,
I'm better off with the crowd of shadows who lost
Their only chance to escape the darkness
On the night I happened to be conceived.

I wonder how many of them would have felt more lucky
With the family allotted me than I did, more pleased
With the neighborhood. So many chances for them
To go out and investigate, in streets that often bored me,
Rumors that the beautiful had been sighted locally.

The sassafras tree in the lot behind the shoe store
Might have been mentioned by some,
Or the straight-backed, white-haired woman
Waiting for the bus in the rain at Main and Biddle.

Even the bowl of cherries she left in her kitchen
Is worth their regard, a bowl they might have painted
In a rush of sympathy for objects small and frail,

Insubstantial and insignificant, or a rush of awe
At how ready the cherries and the bowl appear
To give themselves to the light that's left them,
With nothing held in reserve for a better day.

Carl Dennis
Unknown Friends
Penguin Poets

The Too Late Poem

Nothing in the room can go back.
The ashes couldn't be paper again,
the paper couldn't return to its parental linen rags.
That arrow doesn't reverse: the linen
could never again be a possibility
waiting, alive, inside the field of flax.
Whatever's recently happened
in the room is beyond the boundary of this poem,
but we know this: its people can't go back
to who they were before. And the light,
here, now, or any light as the day goes forward,
yours, or mine ... it can't regain its first existence,
at the start of things: an innocence.
For once it touches the world, it becomes complicit.

__________________

She's left the room. He stays in the bed,
below the covers, and when she exits the house
—the door is audible—he curls up, bean of sadness
that he is. Her travel is greedy, it needs the miles (by now
she's past the city limits). His is weaker, but ambitious,
if by fetal position we mean a desire to travel
the whole life-corridor back to its insular source.
I'm sorry, but we can't: nor can the photons of the cosmos
do a U-turn and reconstitute the Original Field of Energy
the size of a barnyard egg. They're going to scatter outward
over the edge of zero. Barnyard egg ... he remembers
his grandparents' small, hand-labor farm ... the horror when he first saw
a decapitated chicken running crazy in the grit, to flee
the fate that had already happened.

Albert Goldbarth
The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems
Graywolf Press