Editor’s note: This week in Poetry Corner, GT presents the work of Albert Goldbarth, who has written more than 20 books of poetry. He has twice won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. He lives in Wichita, Kansas. The following is a selection of poems from his book, “The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems 1972-2007.” 
Some Things
I’m tired of writing about the gods,
those causal winds we snap in.
Tired of reading their signs in the entrails
when the guts themselves, the fat swags
of an animal, are eloquent enough.
And: if-the-universe-is-expanding-what-
is-it-expanding-into...I’m tired
of all of it, I’m weary of every gasleak
of abstraction. Conscience. Self-determination.
Omniscience. Lassitude. Free will.
The ancient rabbis fasted, prayed
and fasted, finally they were Spirit,
flew through air, were air, were air
on fire around His throne, and
still returned to an umber mug
of cabbage soup in the morning.
Checking the goat in the pen; she
birthed the night before, her vulva
one engorged carnation
with paprika-spots of blood. I may
require theophany after too many
things, but for now give me things.
For now, they have the power of liturgy
off a cuneiform tablet—absolute and hard.
The sixth-grade class once left “a thank you note
for Nick at Twin Donut.” It goes like this:
We saw the deep fryer, the oil, the kitchen,
the rising place for the dough.
Whale and Bee
Earl called today: another fight with Thelma.
Who would doubt it?—evolution wants our marriages
unlikely. We’re experiments, in search of further
alloys of the human genome. Fair enough. And yet
their sadness seems a brutal price to pay
for that. By now—ten years—their daily love is so
entangled, it’s like hearing that the marble
is at war with its own veins. And lately,
any indication of the ways the world is one
holistic organism, melding and dividing
in its small parts, is a wonder that surpasses
my ability to comprehend. That “cloud”
once meant “a hill” ... what was it like
when they first separated?—one remaining
earthbound; and the other in its new life:
vapor, whim. There was an ancient time
when “melody” and “tragedy” were one.
In the nineteenth century, Her Majesty’s Navy
manufactured a brighter and more durable candle
by wedding the heavier oil of the whale
to the wax of the bee.
‘Assisted Living’
makes of her a chameleon: in a week, she looks
like someone who does need assistance.
Some require
the use of a rubber-footed metal walker, some
require a bingo game. The elephants bring leaves
to their afflicted ones: can we do less? And other
animal metaphors appear here. Especially I think
of the cries of the woman in room A2, the reverse
of a bat’s. Oh not because she can see; she’s blind
all right. But because she’s strapped to her bed,
and hers
is an echolocation for staying in place, not flight.
When the krill-rich water is strained through
the whale’s
baleen, it’s already as good as lost to digestion.
That’s the way his mother entered the doorway here,
a self on the way to being transubstantiated self.
Shawl
Eight hours by bus, and night
was on them. He could see himself now
in the window, see his head there with the country
running through it like a long thought made of steel and wheat.
Darkness outside; darkness in the bus—as if the sea
were dark and the belly of the whale were dark to match it.
He was twenty: of course his eyes returned, repeatedly,
to the knee of the woman two rows up: positioned so
occasional headlights struck it into life.
But more reliable was the book; he was discovering himself
to be among the tribe that reads. Now his, the only
overhead turned on. Now nothing else existed:
only him, and the book, and the light thrown over his shoulders
as luxuriously as a cashmere shawl.
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