Albert Goldbarth

Smiths Cloud
It was like my fathers religion
versus my teenage beatnik poetry
his anvil-heavy leather-bound Old Testament
and my ratty paperback Ginsberg Howl
could argue, stamp their adamant textual feet all night,
could eat their way like bookworms through each other,
and yet neither would emerge from the collision
altered by even one word. Mostly, my childhood memories
are benign; we were short on money and long on affection.
My mother, although she made a show of reluctance,
still served separate food
to match the willful and disparate palates of my sister and myself;
she took us by the hand to the dime store,
to the library, where I signed up for my own card like a major!
Aunt Hannah repeatedly told the neighbors I had
bedroom eyeswhatever that was; at five or six
I only knew she thought I was the center of existence:
when I recognized a Pontiac or a Buick by its styling
she would coo as if Id just translated Etruscan.
No one lied to me. Their promises were little but
were kept. Every winter my father got out the chains
for the tires. Every spring he fermented his sticky
homemade brandy, offering up this finished thing
to the world like a million-dollar jewel
on the balsawood tray I clumsied together in wood-shop class.
A kindness, even an innocence, was the dominant tone.
When Jimmy Semkins showed me he could pack
the usual snowball around a stone
for extra hurting power, it struck me

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albert goldbarth

like news from some darker, alternate universe

that understanding, and everything it implied,
hurt worse than the stone could. And in fact,
of course, my childhood was unknowingly congruent
with those other realms, more common perhaps
than mine, in which the twins are glittered-up to be pixies
and passed around the jerking circle like party favors;
in which the evenings food is what
you fight for, against the shanty rats;
in which you breathe when the iron law
of the iron lung allows you to breathe. . . . I think
of Smiths Cloud, the galaxy thats been, and is
even now, in the process of sailing through ours
(and us, through it) although it remains invisible and,
to me and to you in our daily go-round,
unregistered . . . an estimated mass of a million suns,
unfelt . . . it surely reminds us of Andy
and Angela: just three weeks out of their marriage
of seven years, and bumping into either one
wed never guess they ever knew each other, somehow
nothing changed, his idiot grin,
her naughty-child pout . . . I saw her shopping yesterday,
in the strip mall lot she lifted her hands to the light
in a faux-excited greeting, and through her
and through me and really through you,
and the page, and the tree, and the wall, and the firmament,
neutrinos passed, and are passing now, a stream so steady
they didnt pass in a stream so much as be a sheet
unrecognized in us, a sheet of otherworldly substance,
as it passed through my Aunt Hannah and through
the cousins of hers who were fed to the ovens of Dachau,
and through the best minds of my generation
I saw destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
Shma Yisroel, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad.

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