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Desire Song - Albert Goldbarth
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The graspy heart, that lobster of ours that wants, and wants, and is evolved to lust for one grain shat by a swallow in flight as much as the whole packed four-story silo. There’s a cloud across the moon tonight like the skin boiled milk gets cooling—slightly blue and slightly wrinkled. I want the glass of warm milk from my childhood carried up to the crib by a living Grandma Nettie with her hair still singed in odor from the frightening tines of her old-fashioned curler, yes, and I want the moon in its entirety, the moon though the windshield detailing Phyllis’s breast for me the first time it was more than a wish or a centerfold peeked in private, yes, I want the moth of faint veins holding her nipple, the coruscations it made in stiffening, casting complicated shadows within itself not unlike the moon, which I want, and that ‘63 Chevy we parked in, which I want, and the father who loaned it to me that night, who I want waiting up for me, walking the planet instead of being one more battery slipped inside it, powering the rest of us, who are sweating our sheets with our wanting. Michael tells me: in the slammer— call it what you like, the pen, the hoosegow, the big house, call it shit city— you want anything from outside, and a used-up tube of lipstick or the one-eyed spaniel’s water pan can hold the same desire a limousine does. He’s seen kneeling men lick cell bars for the salt a visitor’s palm left. Think of the rib cage… think of the lobster clacking inside its trap. Albert Goldbarth, “Desire Song,” Across the Layers: Poems Old and New (University of Georgia Press, 1993)
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