Poems by Peter Golub

Snow blows through the broken stained glass windows of the cathedral, drifts form around wood pews that remind him of burial mounds. He stands in place for hours until the storm settles and the night is as silent as the moonlight glittering across the snow. He is like some Byzantine saint walking on water or over North African sand dunes. His lips move in the rhythmic recitation of the secret words, his breath unseen on the air.

Only half-listening to the complaints of the pale queen, she serves her enchantress with the proud resignation of an imperial concubine. She has lived myriad lives—two hundred of which were spent as oracle. Once, she was a cliff-dwelling bird in the river valleys of Nekyia and had warned a young mother that her son would thrive only as long as he never knew his true self. Thus, she has played that emblematic role in tragedy, incarnated again and again in a celebration of that arcane arithmetic of dirge and death.

What is this radiant strange beauty? A leaf, the spiral of a shell? Life spreads dark filaments throughout— A blind code recoding. The body copies and remakes. My memory? Is everywhere In every hair and lash. Invisible, An alphabet To grow these hands that write and replicate These eyes that gaze from out the mirror This heart that beats as I lay sleeping. Prometheus’s real gift Our planet of infinitesimal size and infinite potential Has rearranged the fundamental bits of space and time Into a wondrous machine—maternal Earth Is a computer—a cosmic mathematical…

Noctilucent clouds, old growth pines, powdery white snow reflected in pale moonlight. A lynx chased a snowshoe hare over a large snowdrift, and a herd of woolly giants with long tusks moved slowly over a mountain pass in a somber procession. Eventually, the snow receded and the forest grew greener and louder. At the edge of a lake, I saw a herd of small piebald deer with long elegant wings, their translucent feathers shimmering like the water. They watched me intently, and scattered when I approached. I lost consciousness next to the lake and awoke much later covered in papery bright green lichen, which several gnomes picked into tiny baskets. I flew and slept and flew further. How much time passed this way I cannot tell. Eventually words began to thaw and accrue inside my mind, like an old librarian returning dusty tomes onto endless empty shelves. Villages appeared. I drifted over dirt roads and derelict farms—a herd of sheep, a slowly rotating windmill, a lady with a dog, a cat stalking a canary. How I yearned to speak with someone, but instinct told me I would not be welcome. From on high I dropped a pebble near the cat, and the canary flew away. Sometimes, when I fell asleep watching the night sky, I dreamt of a city of light and gods, of enormous pyramids and a bright syzygy. I flew with them over the horizon. Our shapes thrown into stark relief by flashes of lightening as we slowly descended onto the ancient city where each had his own tomb, his own god to watch over and protect. After that dream, I began to count the stars and to notice patterns moving together in unison. I gave these patterns mathematical coordinates. This celestial cartography palliated my bewilderment and loneliness as I adjusted to this strange, diminutive world.

Consider the detective sitting at his desk. It would be absurd to think he is writing a poem, and yet there he is, looking for something in his soul. “Pray tell,” says the doppelganger, “What are you looking for? What clues, what facts do you intend to find in your analytic depths?” The detective shrugs and lights a cigarette off the kerosene lamp. “Love? And, does a machine know evil? No. That will get us nowhere. How about you?” “Me? What is love? What is evil?” “You’re no help.” “What about the elements?” “The elements?” “Are they so elemental? Those few atoms of berkelium. There are twenty-something elements that were made in the high fusion heat of human imagination.” “But this is not love.” “Ah, now we are getting somewhere.” “Love is oxygen—vital, corrosive, constituting 46 percent of the planet.” “At least, that is what they say. One wonders how they measured it and when, with what instruments, and what were they drinking on that late fateful night at the Los Alamos cafe?”

She was the second of the royal twins and had apparently been the cause of their mother’s death. Somehow, in an impossible folding of time, she remembered that day—her mother’s pale face, the strawberry blond hair stuck to a perspiring brow. The sister cried in a nurse’s arms, while another tried to help the physician stymie the hemorrhage. Thomasina lay perfectly still and quiet in a mound of blood soaked rags having been pronounced dead by the physician. But then she blinked and the basin in the nurse’s arms fell to the floor. Now, a hundred years later, standing at the edge of a cliff overlooking a dark sea rising and falling as the mountains shifted across eons, she asked her son: Which statue shall we conjure? Which citadel shall we wreck or resurrect to show them cruelty, the pointlessness of time?