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“Seven Pages”
by Albert Goldbarth
“I am Raoul de la Roche Pierre de Bras, whose father writes himself Lord of Grobois, a free vavasor of the noble Count of Toulouse, with the right of fossa and of furca, the high justice, the middle and the low.”
—Sir Nigel, Arthur Conan Doyle |
A “mini-stroke”: and now Amanda’s father
was a little figure of schoolroom paste
left overnight on the sill:
a sudden rain had turned him general
and blurred. This was the same year
that her mother disappeared, one thread of thought
a day: that doesn’t sound like much, but
in a month the unweaving is terrible to see;
it leaves you talking to the rag left
at the end of the shift, when life is mopping up
and ready to go. This is the common theme
of common poems in every generation, and it still asks
to be said in ours: how quickly!
The rank and lineage that Raoul de Bras unfurls
is like a banner of scarlet and inset gold
the length of a coach-and-six, and equally
weighty. He is a squire and the son of a knight,
and in love with the Countess Beatrice, and an even bloom
of courtliness and valor is as natural to his manners
as is clover to a meadow. It’s on page 192 that we
initially meet him; and he’s dead on page 205, the bolt
of a crossbow “driven to its socket” in his neck.
Is that a unit we can take away and use
in application?—seven pages. Not that this
provides much comfort or illumination: “Wasn’t
Amanda’s father four-times-seven-pages?” etc.
Even so, we’ll try whatever terminology we can
in our attempts to understand the body
swallowed up by time. The prep she did the day
before her colonoscopy, my sister said, “was just
like shitting razor blades”—as accurate
as anything the doctor’s instructional pamphlet says.
And really: what else can we bring to the brink
of our lives, to the line where the darkness starts,
if not our language? When they rolled me into my own
procedure (that’s the pamphlet’s word: “procedure”)
what did I have?—they’d taken away my clothes,
and the tether I use to keep my brain from floating
into anonymity. But a voice survived,
inside somewhere, a voice below
the bullying of the Demerol, and it said
“I’m Albert Goldbarth, whose father signed the rent check
‘Irving Goldbarth’ with the fake gold pen he earned
for over twenty-five years of service with Metropolitan Life Insurance,
he of the genuine heart—and the salesman’s overbearing laugh
that never represented the true heart adequately;
and he gave unto me the lug nuts and the hubcaps
of the north side of Chicago at my birth, as well as the candle
that lights the menorah, and the shockingly sexual pink
of the lox at Sunday brunch, the skivvies
and the quilted winter longjohns, and the prayershawl,
and the secret naughty coin for ‘heads’ and ‘tails,’
and the American right that even an insignificant man
and his insignificant family have, to go to bed
with their honor intact, to walk the dog
as if the night were as good in their nostrils as anyone’s.”
It was small, as I said—a pipsqueak voice,
a match that burned for a moment. And then,
like any match, it was tossed to the pile
of billions of matches preceding it.
Why do I write? It’s what I do
with the portion of carbon I am, before it returns to the universe
of carbon that the trees created even before there were people.
Ontario Review #63
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