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[silverflurry.livejournal.com]

The Sequel to "The Sonnet for Planet 10"

This three-inch glazed ceramic shoe
with the coyly inquisitive glazed ceramic cat astride it
was manufactured in Dresden. The Bible
in Haifa, and the chalkware tabletop Buddha
who looks a little like the latter-day porker Elvis
in Taiwan. The chalk in the pressing
transmutational weight of the sea. The clay
in the buried sea below the topographical contrivance
we call Germany. The sea in the first configuration
of elements spun in the stars. When meteorites
hit air they typically whistle or hum,
and one observer in Rose City, Michigan, in 1921,
is reported saying, "I distinctly heard
fine singing." Swirls in the meteorite
that fell near the Rio del Valle de Allende in 1969
are mineral proof it originated
in astral dust clouds older than the solar system.
But this is getting far from a man
in a small house on North Washtenaw today,
who's organizing what the lawyer calls
his mother's "effects."* It ought to be simple,
a box for save, a box for sell, but everything
he touches is suddenly eloquent of a spacetime nexus
larger than itself. Or maybe he just doesn't want
to think of her gone. I know, because
he's me; because the dull and pitted cleaver
in the chopping bowl is heightened by death
with the pent-in charge we normally think
would sizzle the tip of a finger
touched to an unearthed relic from Sumer.
And what of the "hatful of English pennies,
several rivets, a bunch of keys, a half-crown,
and a bobby's whistle?" these were retrieved
from the stomach of Barnum's vastly famous Jumbo
at the elephant's dissection. Yes, but that's
their easiest provenance, and it gets more complicated,
of course, the way what we see in the sky at night
is light so old its source is often dead.
That's too much "much" for me. I'm
going to sleep for an hour or so
in my mother's bed. I'm going to be like glass
that dreams it's sand again, and sand that dreams
it's once again a living vein in the planet.

* Which then would make her their "cause," I suppose: a kind of etiolology.

Albert Goldbarth
Combinations of the Universe
Ohio State University Press