Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
ALBERT GOLDBARTH<br />
■<br />
At one point, shore becomes a stony tendril<br />
extending into the ocean. Follow this, eventually<br />
you’re standing on the dot below a question mark<br />
—just you, a rock beneath you,<br />
and an endlessness of blue that goes down to Atlantis<br />
and up to the coalsack black of outer space.<br />
It ends here; there’s no further step to take.<br />
Except . . . it sometimes seems there is. I don’t mean<br />
drowning; or astral projection; or anything that<br />
dramatically metamorphic. But: isn’t there an inch<br />
beyond, that’s still you . . . but a fog of you,<br />
a foam of you . . . a you that isn’t beat every day<br />
by the whisk of waking up human. . . .<br />
■<br />
Of hundreds of luscious and nearly naked<br />
nineteen-year-old tanners on this beach, the one<br />
whose poses take my wildly roving fancy<br />
deepest into her is a woman with an arrogantly careless<br />
squat, her ass become the reckless cleft<br />
a fuchsia thong’s slim, spandex grip accentuates . . .<br />
ooo, yumyum: girl; ooo, zero-in: girl.<br />
Is this<br />
what happened to D. and M.?—this common greed<br />
monogamy won’t tolerate. Or could it be more<br />
complicated?<br />
—one of them did get within reach<br />
of stepping into a fog-self, into a foam-self,<br />
and (so often the case) was frightened by it,<br />
or bored by it, was faced with a self<br />
too alien, and so there was no antidote<br />
but running back to the messiest part<br />
of being human again.<br />
■<br />
Now Spring has returned, enticing boats<br />
to dance upon the waves once more. . . .<br />
in The Greek Anthology [X:2].<br />
Here, they’re lined up in the marina:<br />
30 <strong>Beloit</strong> <strong>Poetry</strong> <strong>Journal</strong> Fall 2002<br />
—Antipater of Sidon,<br />
➝
Change language