- Albert Goldbarth / Little, Big

Words I’d like to get in a poem,
hemoglobin and chifforobe and ombudsman and mahogany.
Meanwhile, a friend is studying the maha¯yuga,
the “Cycle of Cycles,” 4,320,000 years,
and its relationship to subvibrations of charm
or salsa or stodginess or whatever other
qualities are being ascribed this afternoon to the spectral
stipples of quantum physics. Another friend is formidably
gaga over cetology, and if she could would happily spelunk
the living gullet with rope and calipers; the penis
is prodigiously ten feet, their underocean songs
unscroll a hundred miles, etc. And here I am,
with seiche, chignon, persnickety, with hobnob,
allemande, fandango, and grommet. Here we all are,

  *

mostly, cleaning the pleats of our fussy little pursuits,
our ball bearings and milk teeth; banging spear
on horsehide shield, against the residue
kablooey of the Big Bang; gung-ho throwing our bodies
into love, our bodies that are jackstraws
cast by gods in games of chance. Inside
such vastitude, our harvested ambitions pop
like corn and are gone in an instant. Either that, or by
their brevity, and a passionate care we lavish on this brevity,
they take on their peculiar human beauty. When I
stayed with my cetologist friend, I saw her bed,
a box spring cleanly joindered to a frame of varnished
whale ribs; so she and her husband dreamed
and clutched in a basket of those colossi. Late

  *

that night, I pass their door: I’m thinking fritz
and blitz and scalawag and leukocyte but stop
at sex’s tremolo (she’d have her fist of hair unpinned,
outfanned; and he’d be lost inside her rhythm . . .);
or it’s sobbing. Rumor, is that what I hear? or tumor?
– one more pointillistic jitterdot
by which a life for better or worse is transported.
I walk out on the deck in a cloud of the small words,
photon, muon, leprechaun. I know that somewhere
a man paints faithful portraits of friends on grains of rice.
I know that out on the waters tonight, the whales slide
together like hands in prayer the size of city blocks.
And gently, almost powdering it, the ombudsman moon
ameliorates the naked light of the sun.