Albert Goldbarth

The Song of the Tags

“Yesterday morning, root canal. That night,
a power failure. How lovely:

throwing up by candlelight.”
There are so many wonderful

titles for poems!
“Straw Votes on Burning Issues.”

“May Divorce Be with You.”
“Throwing Up by Candlelight.” The more I hear

my students’ lives, the more I understand
this game of theirs—of ours, for I do it

too. Last week, my friends Cecile and Layle
split, and the rift was accompanied by

more jeremiads and spittled gall
than came from the Bible’s most

inveighing prophets—also, accompanied by
her new beau with the tattoo of hellfire

over his cheeks and temples (oh how
droll, I remember somebody saying)

and his new woo-woo bedfriend
with the boobs from planet Implant; as if

physics weren’t whirling blur enough
to bruise our brains: “at twenty nanokelvins,

atoms smear and coalesce into a fuzzy metaparticle
known as a Bose-Einstein condensate...”; as if

somehow it makes sense that we can’t comprehend
our brains’ own hundred billion neurons

with our brains’ hundred billion neurons; that,
and terrorist bombs, and God’s inscrutable humor,

and now, and now, we have the shapeless
Cecile and Layle story too. Oh don’t we cling

to the strings of our captions and tags!
“I Hate You So Much, I Love Shit-for-Brains.”

That was the title we gave it;
and so—for a while—we understood it.

ALBERT GOLDBARTH lives in Wichita, “The Gateway to Boredom,” Kansas, and his fingers have never touched a computer keyboard. His current collections are Saving Lives, poems published by Ohio State University Press, and Many Circles: New and Selected Essays, published by Graywolf Press.

“The Song of the Tags” appears in our Autumn 2001 issue.

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