[New-Poetry] Goldbarth/Moonology

[David Graham]

Moonology

The shock of a contemporary seeing St. Jerome
at his studies—reading, but not
by moving his lips! Somewhere
— in his chest, in his skull—
another mouth had to be moving!

__________

There's a flower inside of the flower
the bee doesn't know about
until it's too late; an Earth
inside of Earth, and we uncover
its temple columns, weapons, scrapers, coins,
and marvel as if this were Mars.
And we've been told, and in our turn
we've said, such urgently genuine things,
such very extraordinary things!—and
all the while, the mouth inside of the mouth,
the mouth in the balls, or the mouth that gathers
like a pollen on the fallopian tips,
or the gulping sound

in a bay of the brain where swamp
has never dried out in all these millennia . . .
a mouth like that says something different,
private and pressed to its pillow.
We think we see the "face" of the moon,
there isn't any culture's folklore
that says otherwise; but what if it faces
the other direction, mouthing something
dark to our understanding, against
its dark place on the night? The voice
in the belly. The sting in the conscience.
The mouth in the chromosome.
The chromosome in a mouth.
The eyes in the fingertips.
A lake in a lake, a sky in a sky.

--Albert Goldbarth.  Combinations of the Universe.  Ohio State UP, 2003.



==========================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
==========================================



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