Desire Song
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 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,
power 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 of a visitor’s palm left.
Think of the rib cage… think of the lobster
clacking inside its trap.
— Albert Goldbarth. The Kitchen Sink.
