Weekly Poem: ‘Too Here’

By Albert Goldbarth

Maybe the gods do walk among us, swaggering,
consoling, pitying, lusting for our warmth and inexperience
that must be a kind of sexual veal to them
— whatever, maybe they are here, always, invisibly.
Maybe we do exist in fields of psychic interconnection,
and the way electromagnetism or gravity is a grain
that patterns space-time, so are waves
— although we’ll never be aware of them — of hunch
and luck or telepathy. As for neutrinos:
it isn’t maybe. They’re showering through this page
and your hand and your heart right now. The moth
beats in a frenzy around the candle flame, as if trying
to whip the light itself into a cream. It can’t refuse
the bulb in the bedside lamp, the headlight in the car.
And yet it doesn’t even seem to see the sun
— the sun is too here for that.

Albert Goldbarth 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.