D____ L____'s Poem by Albert Goldbarth

Fathers are invariably great nuisances on the stage, and always have to give the hero or heroine a long explanation of what was done before the curtain rose, usually commencing with "It is now nineteen years, my dear child, since ..." etc., etc.
—Charles Dickens

There might be a planet. Before that,
though, there would have been a gas that coalesced
into a planet . . . as, before that, there were dots of flux
and energy that hadn't yet declared themselves
in concert. There's always "before": there's more
each minute, more each person, yes and every one
of its smallest, irreducible subparticles—which I name
the "beforeon"—is exerting force on us
that's surely time's own version of gravity: its purpose
is to tug, and to remind us. In the house of second marriages,

it causes the man to do what he and the woman had promised
they never would: one night while she's asleep, he snoops
her bureau for telltale relics of the mysterious Mr.
Number One. And why, or even what
he hopes to find, he couldn't clearly say: a letter? photo?
sex toy?—something, some objectified gossip, a fossil
of bygone love. Essentially, we make of our own psyches
a bureau and pay a shrink to snoop; as for the moment
when our neural linkage first began to form,
as for the flavor of the fluids in the womb. . . we're all

amnesiacs: and our earliest self, just like the universe's
earliest being, is a "phantom limb" with the faintest
mnemonic of starbursts in an otherwise chill void. I have
a friend D____ L____ (this poem is hers) who, orphaned
as a newborn, is devoted to learning her origin
as doggedly as any cosmologist tracks light to its source, although
her search (when not pure Internet) is more a matter
of tape-recording the beer-sour stories in sailor bars,
of sifting ashy memories in nursing homes,
one backwards inch of plotline at a time. And yet somebody

else is waking up this morning with the need
to be detached from any history,
to stand here like a person in a play who enters
onstage from a pool of perfect blankness. Then,
of course, he can start over, minute-zero-of-year-zero,
unbesmirched. We could have told him that he'd be this
anguished—sneaking in her drawer, below those folded
pastel lozenges of lingerie, uncovering the one thing
that could ruin them. Now he wants only to float (who
doesn't, sometimes?) in an anti-world: appealing, but

illusory. We can't unmoor ourselves from linearity,
no more than any one of us can be a human being
unconnected to a genome—and in fact, no more
than Mama-All-of-Time-and-Space-Herself (I mean
the cosmos) can unwrap her vasty body from its own
twelve million years of Big Bang "background radiation"
so it wafts—a tossed off, filmy scarf—far elsewhere.
No; there isn't any "elsewhere." When we sleep
or simply deepen into quietude enough, the voices
come—the rhythmic, grave, ancestral murmur,

a woman bearing a ritual clamshell bowl . . .
a man with a done-deal sales contract . . . whispers,
knuckle-rap, cleared throats. . . . Her great-grandfather,
D____ L____ has uncovered, was a lector—a reader they used
to relieve the tedium of the leaf rollers' shifts
in cigar manufactories. Shakespeare, Dickens,
union tracts, love letters, family diaries . . . . He's
walking through the tobacco aroma; he's setting his text
on his easel; and the story—the only story we know,
the story of Before—is recited.