“Where Babies Come From”
by Albert Goldbarth

—that was the book
my parents' generation slyly placed around
the house as if by accident: maybe it would do
the embarrassing job. It didn't;
its Euclidean cutaways couldn't have demystified
a handshake. Anyway, even that young, I
understood how bogus was its offered logic: men enter
women; children come forth; they mature to the point
where men enter women. Talk about
"circular reasoning"! What about the thrumming yearn
of god for swan? of dinosaur for dinosaur?
of protein infrastructure for the zing of loose electrolytes
in the origin-water? of element for element
in the irradiant love in the hearts of the stars in the ever-promiseful heavens?

Sometimes I wake, my wife is beside me
generating the small sleep-sounds of keeping on
unbroken through the break between two days.
If I look long enough, of course—until that earliest
preamble of the sun's—she starts to clarify
as a shape, as if the darkness is giving her
back to the world. Soon, she's less a cipher
and more of a plain true thing. And even so,
for a second every now and then, her shape blurs,
like a figure in a watercolor
overdamped—or like the way a drawing
might indicate speed. The same when she
looks at me. That's right: because
we come from somewhere, and we're going somewhere,
at slightly mismatched velocities.

At the Children's Museum, the walkthrough gawkers
see a working thunderstorm in the "weather chamber"
accrue its full malevolence; they slide
on soft toboggan-disks (as "red cells") through
the chutes of a human's cardiovascular system;
they electro-intertext with a robot family.
For the coddled urban especially, there's
a simulated farmstead, where a sim-cow
can be milked, a sim-wheatfield sown
and harvested in seven minutes of sim-time;
plus a room where hen's eggs—real eggs,
shipped daily—are being candled by hand:
rows of tiny astronauts
who have come to Earth from so far.

The Ontario Review, Inc. #66