Lullabye with Questions, and: Following Illness, and: Pillow / Grief

GOLDBARTH 15 ALBERT GOLDBARTH LULLABYE WITH QUESTIONS 1. Will it be okay? It'll be okay. There's protein in lentils, as much as in beef, and we can still buy lentUs. We're not so poor. We're not so browbeat yet. And lima, and chickpea, and navy, and kidney. And Jack and his magic beans? Yes Jack and his magic beans. 2. The tin lid clanks floorward, giving sunlight off its jagged edge like a moon. And the beans. . . what can I say, my son? ... are beans. And we must hurry; they're growing softer in their preservative paste, if fingers had brains they'd look like this, pale, tired, smooth from touching the truth; let's eat our lunch; then fix, or try to fix, the long-ignored, accumulative gaps where the rain leaks in, the wind whistles pulmotor tunes, and federal knives affix an ear small and slimed as a snail-sole to our phone line. They're good for you, finish your beans. We've the can lid for a mirror, it hits us back with our own wavy smiles, see my son how our teeth are still good 16 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW for grinding. It's okay. I can see, when light strikes the lid like strafing, usually at sunset, our fists are good for clenching, our hearts for beating the whole night through. It's okay. Go to sleep. Our breaths are good for plugging the roof-holes, and I have certain words I've been saving: hotter than rivets, sharper than screws. It's okay. We won't have to be afraid of winter or the ambulance, go to sleep my son, we won't have to hide our love from transitors when friends dial wild with wine, we'll say what we please, go to sleep, it's okay, when we wake I promise we won't have to breakfast on beans again. I see this all in the tin can Hd and, with this lullabye, turn my back on where my neck's reflected caught on the twisted silver edge, as if both units of a suicide done up neatly as one. 3. And, while I'm still alive, and game, and smiling no matter how it's bent, isn't it fitting I write this to you, my son, my one of a mUlion brothers foaming on a pinhead in my testicles, my improbable, love? GOLDBARTH 11 FOLLOWING ILLNESS The ten-thousand faces of gravel break the light. The pockets, on a night like this, take the hands as olives hold dark stones in a place the light knows only by beating through oU and flesh. This is the first walk of the first season following Ulness, and what science cured is learning the world again, out in its air, remembering the days before fever, the long drawing up of the phlegm. There are truths that half have to do with science. Light can burden, heavy as bone. The moon, for all its pretensions, is a stone. A man is alone. PILLOW / GRIEF AU night the head is borne by feathers, and sleeplessness is flight. There are points we come to in our lives so high up, the world is round. But now, tonight, is the short, erratic traveUing for answers, in the diameter of a flashlight raUroad tracks are not curved, and so imply the engine's toppling off the earth's edge. At this precipice a dove's no more good than a lemming, though it lasts aU night —its ark goes down with its mate on. Goldbarth, close your eyes and turn to the pUlow stuffed with its soft, sUent fossüs. ...