Two Poems: Albert Goldbarth
The Song of the Needle He said he knew a woman in Sedalia, Missouri, who had stepped on a needle as a girl and nine years later the needle worked out of the thigh of her third child. —Charles Portis, in True Grit
Some instances are credible. The poet Charles Wright once said to a group of us that he knew a woman whose body accepted a sliver of glass that traveled for years—for years—across the great striated hummocks of muscle and through the inland sea we call our blood, a sort of small Old Testament wandering in the wilderness, and undergoing diminishment as of a pencil blunting itself in use; and then one day exited, worn to something more essential and more beautiful now, the way that rocks are rounded smooth by their slo-mo centuries-tumble in the ocean. I can believe that understanding of “return.” But . . . over generations? over species? across the line between human