Liquid (excerpt from)
– Albert Goldbarth

“All told, the moon’s water—locked away in rocks
under the surface—equals “about two and a half times
the volume of the great lakes.”
                         —The Week, July 2-9, 2010

What other things, what other conditions, are locked away
improbably in rock—in an inhuman hardness?
Moses … doesn’t the story go he smote
a rock in the wilderness with his staff and, lo,
therefrom the waters poured? And Mrs. Sommerson,
the Great Stone Face my mother called her,
regent of the Eighth-Grade Algebra Kingdom, she
who pity’s violin strings couldn’t move a quarter inch
from her unyielding scowl and decimal-pointed grade book …
when one evening I was late in leaving,
and quietly making my passage
down those eerily untenanted halls, I saw
her home room door was opened just enough to show her
at her desk, in tears, her head held in her hands
with such an autonomous weight, she cradled it
as if trying to rock into comfort a terrorized infant.

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For more information about Albert Goldbarth, please click here: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/1295
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