Dignity

They say that the first stage is disbelief; and then
panic and fear, as an entry ramp
to acceptance.  From there, one reaches the wish
to undergo the suffering with dignity.  There will be
other stages, but this is the one that claims him
now, and he rises to meet the occasion as if he’s a figure
in a fifteenth-century set-scene, where the air in the room
itself—done in the brassy golds of an armory
or a jeweler to the court, and displaying the fine craquelure
we associate with pedigree—is enough to keep
a person from slumping or frantic gesture; it
cinches one into civility.  The two birds on the branch
outside the window are so perfect, they might be mounted
on a bezel.  In a world of plague, and soldiers returned
from the war with their legs in a sack for souvenirs,
and a woman so weary she doesn’t realize the infant
at her nipple is already dead . . . these birds
and this air and the general hush are not
an antidote, exactly; more an acknowledgment
filtered through will and composure.  Overhead, the sun
is a medallion.  The clearly perimetered lake in the distance
could be a silversmith’s gift.  And the angel,
when it arrives, speaks with its breath in a formal
and ornate scroll, bearing the hard announcement.

Too Here

Maybe the gods do walk among us, swaggering,
consoling, pitying, lusting for our warmth and inexperience
that must be a kind of sexual veal to them
—whatever, maybe we do exist in fields of psychic interconnection,
and the way electromagnetism or gravity is a grain
that patterns space-time, so are waves
—although we’ll never be aware of them—of hunch
and luck and telepathy.  As for neutrinos:
it isn’t maybe.  They’re showering through this page
and your hand and your heart right now.  The moth
beats in a frenzy around the candle flame, as if trying
to whip the light itself into a cream.  It can’t refuse
the bulb in the bedside lamp, the headlight on the car.
And yet it doesn’t even seem to see the sun
—the sun is too here for that.

 From To Be Read in 500 Years. © 2009 by Albert Goldbarth. All rights reserved.