How Simile Works

The drizzle-slicked cobblestone alleys

of some city;

                        and the brickwork back

of the lumbering Galapagos tortoise

they'd set me astride, at the "petting zoo" . . . .

The taste of our squabble still in my mouth

the next day;

                        and the brackish puddles sectioning

the street one morning after a storm. . . .

So poetry configures its comparisons.

My wife and I have been arguing; now

I'm telling her a childhood reminiscence,

stroking her back, her naked back that was

the particles in the heart of a star and will be

again, and is hers, and is like nothing

else, and is like the components of everything.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Rereading Attempts at Poetry

From My Earliest Teenage Years

Frankly, it amazes me

--how urgently he talked about death,

this sweet blank flan of a boy

as yet untouched by it

in any way, except for the general knowledge

that lurks in everybody's neural complexitypaths

from birth.  How urgently; and sometimes,

even, convincingly.  The body with the single

professional gang-commissioned death-hole

where the vein snakes up a temple . . .

or the larger and bloodier butcherwork

the surgeons will make in twenty more years

of his mother's gut . . . he has no knowledge

of these, his world is simple and clement,

and yet his small vocabulary is fuel,

it seems, for death, and almost anything

can spark it to combustion . . . I think

of cartoon animation people running off a cliff:

they'll fall, of course, but first

their innocence and energy will keep them

successfully aerial.  The same when he faces

spiritual longing . . . his words are meat

on the altar, his words are knees on the hard-ridged shells

of the oracle floor . . . this boy,

untested by anything more

than a standardly difficult day at school

or a family spat . . . his words, his breaths, like any aspirant's,

ascend in search of the numinous . . .

and I think of the initial zipping trail

of the skipped stone:  it will sink

but not before its moments of magic.

And love!--his assault upon love.

And sex!--yes, somehow, Ess,Ee,Ex,

its etiquettes and its violences

and its stinkflower gravitational pull

and its ice-grip and its swamp of no return

and its beckoning wetlands and its explosions

of small god-pleasures and unwashable chemical force,

its hokey-pokey in the honkeytonk,

its musk, its mask, let's face it:

only great ignorance

is up to that task.

--Both poems by Albert Goldbarth, from his book To Be Read in 500 Years