Albert Goldbarth Poems

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
...

The renewal project is doomed: because
its funding board's vice-president resigned: because
the acids of divorce were eating day-long
at her stomach, at her thoughts: because
...

1862: Dante Gabriel Rossetti buried his young wife Elizabeth Rossetti with a sheaf of his unpublished poems.


. . . and then of course the weeping: some demurely, some
flamboyantly. Those elegiac tears, if shed
...

The light has traveled unthinkable thousands of miles to be
condensed, recharged, and poured off the white white pages
of an open Bible the country parson holds in front of this couple
in a field, in July, in the sap and the flyswirl of July
...

The drizzle-slicked cobblestone alleys
of some city;
and the brickwork back
of the lumbering Galapagos tortoise
...

sleep, little beansprout
don't be scared
the night is simply the true sky
bared
...

These two asleep . . . so indrawn and compact,
like lavish origami animals returned

to slips of paper once again; and then
the paper once again become a string
...

Physics says: go to sleep. Of course
you're tired. Every atom in you
has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes
nonstop from mitosis to now.
...

Eight hours by bus, and night
was on them. He could see himself now
in the window, see his head there with the country
...