Weekly Poem: 'How Simile Works'

**By Albert Goldbarth** The drizzle-slicked cobblestone alleys of some city;                        and the brickwork back of the lumbering Galapagos tortoise they'd set me astride, at the "petting zoo".... The taste of our squabble still in my mouth the next day;                        and the brackish puddles sectioning the street one morning after a storm.... So poetry configures its comparisons. My wife and I have been arguing; now I'm telling her a childhood reminiscence, stroking her back, her naked back that was the particles in the heart of a star and will be again, and is hers, and is like nothing else, and is like the components of everything.   "Albert Goldbarth":http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=2591 is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and has won numerous awards, including two National Book Critics Circle Awards. He is a professor of humanities at Wichita State University, where he has taught since 1987.