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  • W’s, and: STD
  • Albert Goldbarth (bio)

W’s

It wasn’t someone puffing a monster doobie, it was Zito’s van’s exhaust in the lilac evening air, but this was 1971 and thus that metaphoric capability came easily, the joint was passed, the congregants on Noni’s porch were . . . “stoners” I guess is the word, although Emilio was a journalism major too and an aspirant toward a night in Amy’s army surplus pants, and Noni was also a single mother of two and a stripper out at Tyme 4 Fun, and Zito studied philosophy when he wasn’t under that van with a wrench and a hundred curses yelled forth like ball lightning, he was also the son of a woman who ran for Congress with a pro-war plank her party nailed mightily into her platform, which conflicted his pacifist soul, for 1971 was not the year of marijuana only, but also the year the war [End Page 74] was levering friends and family apart, and also the year that Zito’s mother had the lump checked out in a room where the wattage turned her into a frozen doe in headlights (this happened once to her son, and explained the canted fender that always gave his van the look of having suffered a stroke) and she walked into the night with her medical news around her like a necklace with a living bird between her breasts for a pendant, and it kept trying to fly, to lift her off the earth and toward the little crib death spaces in between the stars, so empty and so sad, because the earth was also a vector of time and space that traveled implacably through the universe, and took us with it so fast we were a cloud (said Amy, exhaling a particularly emphatic one herself) and Emilio started to explain the staunch five W’s of journalism, but who and what and when and where and why, he said, were dead in the twentieth century, and then he shrugged, so tenderly, with a gesture that took in all of us.

STD

And SDS: “Students for a Democratic Society,” that radical-hippie-protest-movement youth group

of the 1960s. When I was a junior in high school my parents were “worried sick” those “college punks”

would taint me, just one evening of their politics, a word, a wink, would be a roaring pipeline [End Page 75]

of corruption. Although really I only wanted to be there flirting around with Lena Greenberg—that was body politic

enough for me, at sixteen. And indeed it only took a wink, a microscopic jot . . . and then

the rash, and the frightening urinary fire, and the doctor’s swab he said would be “uncomfortable”

and agonied like a bullet up my penis shaft.

Whatever part of the earth is in the sky connives to return—and so it rains;

and so it snows; and so the locusts settle eventually with such a hunger for earth,

it disappears in them before they fly again. And the gods . . . they also settle,

briefly, here on our level; and they also have hungers, ask Adonis or Leda: we’re the custards

of an evening, for the gods, and whatever off-the-scale invisible spirochete of wham-bam otherworld exposure

is involved, its consequences are measured by dynasties arising or toppling, countrysides redistricted, and people

metamorphosed into marble, flower, bark, wind, and transanimal bodies of every conceivable species.

It’s like lightning: it might only take a contact point on the skin the size of a dime or less, the size [End Page 76]

of a needle tatting your lover’s initials into your ass or less, and yet you could be lifted and flung

a quarter-mile into the neighbor’s milo. All of the oldest stories—ancient Athens, Bethlehem, etc.—

somewhere in them feature a person who implores the sky to come down with its majesty. It only requires

a hair to be touched, one pore, and the story ends in a dazzle of glory. (Or a pile of ash.)

Somewhat to my current shame, I’ve never been arrested at a protest march. But I...

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