June 2016
Barbara Goldberg
barbaragoldberg8@gmail.com
barbaragoldberg8@gmail.com
The author of five prize-winning books of poetry, including The Royal Baker’s Daughter (winner of the Felix Pollak Poetry Award), my most recent book is Kingdom of Speculation. I have received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as awards in translation, fiction and speechwriting. I am Series Editor of the Word Works’ International Editions, my latest selection being Handful of Salt, translations of the Kurdish poet Kajal Ahmad. Please visit my website, www.barbaragoldberg.net.
Star
It was a silver star with the word liar
stamped on it and my father made me wear it
because I was one. He knew I hadn’t taken
my bath, just turned the faucets on, knew
my scrapbook on Brazil was overdue (two
pictures of the Amazon pasted on the cover).
Spinning stories to wriggle out of things
made him madder, one deceit compounding
another, especially since my father was a man
of his word and his word was gold. I was glad
when he died and could let Danny feel me up
with no one the wiser, glad he didn’t see me
run through his money like a woman bent
on ruination. If only he could have lied a little,
he who had so little charm, so little social grace.
But for him truth was absolute, was never grey.
As for me, there are so many truths it’s hard
to tell the one big one that underlies them all:
I loved my father, love him even more today
though he was mean and cut me down to size
and I was small to begin with. He left me bare
of subterfuge without a leg to stand on but my own.
-from Royal Baker’s Daughter
Far-Flung
Honeybees and frogs are fast disappearing. What
will become of little green apples, the loneliness
of lilypads? Some species of moths no longer pollinate
Arizonan yuccas. Askance, askew, something is
amiss. A tsunami one hundred feet high washes away
three thousand souls in Papua New Guinea. It’s hard
to know when disasters are natural. Once I was stung
by a bee and my arm swelled like a melon. In college
a date slipped a frog down my blouse and I couldn’t
stop screaming, those frantic hind legs. In high school
I pithed a toad. Later I saw a half-carved cadaver, head
and feet wrapped in soaked cloth, the yellow jelly we
call fat. The leaner they are, the harder to cut. Blandings’
turtles don’t deteriorate with age. Our brain is the size
of two clenched fists. The hand is the most complicated
of organs. Which, as is written on a card I carry
in my wallet, I will donate to others — eyes, liver, lungs,
heart, whatever can be salvaged, should all else fail.
-from Royal Baker’s Daughter
The Highway of Bones
Under no stars on the highway
of bones, the princess broods
on her losses: the King is dead,
the Queen is dead, her beloved
nursemaid Gertruda demented, she
who spun fanciful tales of dwarfs
with spurs on their boots. Farewell
Gertruda. Thus intent, the princess
trips on a femur, falls, cracks open
her head. Demons appear to snatch
that part of her soul called memoria.
Out flies the King, the Queen, Gertruda,
and everything she ever knew, that one
and one makes two, that two from two
is naught. And there she might lie
till this very day had her shadow not
lassoed the demons with a skein
of dreams, thus releasing memoria
which recomposed in the princess's skull,
who awoke, remembered, refreshed.
-from Kingdom of Speculation (Accent Publishers, 2015)
Star
It was a silver star with the word liar
stamped on it and my father made me wear it
because I was one. He knew I hadn’t taken
my bath, just turned the faucets on, knew
my scrapbook on Brazil was overdue (two
pictures of the Amazon pasted on the cover).
Spinning stories to wriggle out of things
made him madder, one deceit compounding
another, especially since my father was a man
of his word and his word was gold. I was glad
when he died and could let Danny feel me up
with no one the wiser, glad he didn’t see me
run through his money like a woman bent
on ruination. If only he could have lied a little,
he who had so little charm, so little social grace.
But for him truth was absolute, was never grey.
As for me, there are so many truths it’s hard
to tell the one big one that underlies them all:
I loved my father, love him even more today
though he was mean and cut me down to size
and I was small to begin with. He left me bare
of subterfuge without a leg to stand on but my own.
-from Royal Baker’s Daughter
Far-Flung
Honeybees and frogs are fast disappearing. What
will become of little green apples, the loneliness
of lilypads? Some species of moths no longer pollinate
Arizonan yuccas. Askance, askew, something is
amiss. A tsunami one hundred feet high washes away
three thousand souls in Papua New Guinea. It’s hard
to know when disasters are natural. Once I was stung
by a bee and my arm swelled like a melon. In college
a date slipped a frog down my blouse and I couldn’t
stop screaming, those frantic hind legs. In high school
I pithed a toad. Later I saw a half-carved cadaver, head
and feet wrapped in soaked cloth, the yellow jelly we
call fat. The leaner they are, the harder to cut. Blandings’
turtles don’t deteriorate with age. Our brain is the size
of two clenched fists. The hand is the most complicated
of organs. Which, as is written on a card I carry
in my wallet, I will donate to others — eyes, liver, lungs,
heart, whatever can be salvaged, should all else fail.
-from Royal Baker’s Daughter
The Highway of Bones
Under no stars on the highway
of bones, the princess broods
on her losses: the King is dead,
the Queen is dead, her beloved
nursemaid Gertruda demented, she
who spun fanciful tales of dwarfs
with spurs on their boots. Farewell
Gertruda. Thus intent, the princess
trips on a femur, falls, cracks open
her head. Demons appear to snatch
that part of her soul called memoria.
Out flies the King, the Queen, Gertruda,
and everything she ever knew, that one
and one makes two, that two from two
is naught. And there she might lie
till this very day had her shadow not
lassoed the demons with a skein
of dreams, thus releasing memoria
which recomposed in the princess's skull,
who awoke, remembered, refreshed.
-from Kingdom of Speculation (Accent Publishers, 2015)
©2016 Barbara Goldberg