Museum Pieces - Beloit Poetry Journal

ALBERT GOLDBARTH
Vacation: Carolina Coast
Maybe it’s because we’re all born into this world
on a wing of blood, that we can’t stop from seeing our lives
in sunrise on the water.
Of course enough of us leave
in violence, that sunset is also powerful
metaphorically. Enough of us sink out of this world
still burning, still believing
that the night is long, but passes.
■
One day a distracted gull got into the beach house,
through the front door, as if it were a rightful tenant.
That was its attitude, in fact, for the whole
two-hour comic opera chase: that somehow I
was the one who simply was renting this space
for a little while.
■
date: the late l770s
Unable to secure financial backing
for his telescope, and undeterred, the avid
William Herschel made the necessary molds himself
from horse shit. With that finished apparatus,
he could see “the farthest stars,
the highest, and most angelically rarefied
aerial show.” As with this gull:
this garbage feeder,
picker of offal,
eater of gutter dung, that rises
into the clear empyrean.
■
J. phoned today. Among the news:
that D. and M. are separating.
“Look, these things happen. It’s difficult,”
she said, “for poet-and-poet marriages.”
Yes, I suppose. Although you might think,
to look out my window, that water and water
are easily—are perfectly—water.
What better formula is there?
You might think . . . well, anything you or I
28 Beloit Poetry Journal Fall 2002
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