BAP 2009: "Zones" by Albert Goldbarth

Continuing my meandering through the Best American Poetry 2009 (and my seat of the pants "analysis") brings me to "Zones" by Albert Goldbarth. Goldbarth’s an erudite poet who’s been growing on me over the past few years. A platinum member of the ultra-talk poetry club, Goldbarth weighs in here with a not-too-talky entry into the genre:

"Zones"

There are bootprints on the moon, as permanent
as airlessness provides for; she’s seen photographic proof ,
their tread an orderly, distinctly human
grid left in the dust … and yet she can’t influence
Chino’s heart just one inch on the other side
of his sternum: and she thumps, as if to prove it,
the chest of her obdurate sixteen-year-old son,
his drugs, his whores, his what-not, while
he stares at her through a mask-of-a-face then
turns away to something more important. Later
I leave, too; I drive back home, eleven city blocks
is a million miles away. Who knows and who knows

and who ever knows? A delivery girl at the airport
with a box, Hand Carry Only *HUMAN EYES*, and
yawning as if she holds a baggie of burgers. Who
believes, at this late date, that any politician’s face
betrays a single clue of emotion any more
than gold face-plates of ancient Cretan sea-kings
in a museum case? The light comes down
as probing as it is in a police interrogation room.
The light comes down as tossed, as unreliable, as it is
in a storm-shook linden tree. Spectroscopy: "we know more now
about the composition of the stars than, say, what constitutes
an act of love in the house from across the street."

Ultra-talk is one of the freer forms of free verse and brings with it some of the same appeal that a certain kind of prose poem and short fiction does: a breathless, tumbling forward motion that demands the author be a great storyteller and/or possessor of a deep intellectual playfulness (with the knowledge to back it up). That’s the kind of poem Goldbarth is known for– or at least the kind I know Goldbarth for– and this poem is a decent, if somewhat light, example.

Poets like Goldbarth take the intuitive and associative "leap" seriously, often in ways that present gaps much wider than Goldbarth ventures here. The back and forth of logic and emotion, science and the heart, is explicit, implying the classic "we can put a man on the moon, but we can’t …" idea in a couple of different forms. But the truth isn’t as neat as such parallels might make it out to be, which is why I love love love the stanza break, the "who knows and who knows / and who ever knows?" making clear the limit of parallel and metaphor, the unknown before diving back to analogy. And what a Goldbarthian move to not just make a simile the yawning delivery girl’s bored pose to a "baggie of burgers" but then double-up by invoking the likeness of Cretan sea-kings…

There’s a shape to this poem, as free as it is, consisting of the brackets of the outside inside comparisons– the bootprints on the moon and the heart in Chino’s chest; the composition (and light) of the stars and the composition (and light) of an act of love– around the unknowable core (who knows, who knows) of both. What gives this symmetry a forward momentum is the repetition of what we can know (the light, the light).

The weakness of this poem is probably exactly what made it (as opposed to some of Goldbarth’s more adventurous outings) fit for inclusion in a relatively safe volume like BAP: it borders on being too precious and self-aware, ultra-talk code for "safe," a characteristic not done any favors by the setup in the opening stanza. The problem there is that I don’t really buy that Goldbarth the poet really witnessed such a scene, but if he didn’t then that setup borders on cliché.

But I’m willing to forgive a fair amount when the heart and meat of a poem tells me the truth, as this one does. And as I’ve noted before– and will note again many times– I’m a sucker for a good close and "Zones" provides just that with an entry from a poetry-infused dictionary of the imagination.