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miles
albert goldbarth
. . . and although the chinese police refused to allow me
into a town so near the border of tibet,
and lifted guns to make their point, that afternoon
i played a game of pick-up basketball
with six of them: what 1 freaks!—says
my friend d’s twenty-year-old son from an internet café. perhaps
because i’m from a certain generation and a certain unsophisticated
socioeconomic class, this casual ability to travel the planet
astonishes me: i worry how to tip in foreign currency
in a cab with the 2 that someone else might bring
to saving a marriage or forging a middle east peace treaty.
and travel is astonishing; on the weeks-long
rat-infested vomit-sour voyage in steerage
from his shtetl in the “old world” to america,
my grandpa louie was ordered into the sunlight once,
to help in heaving 3, and the passengers he saw there
—with their parasols and top hats, with their monocles
and their 4 straw boaters, and white,
white clothes that had never contacted 5, “oont
vun vooman hass a green birt on her shoulder
mit a golt chain, oont it talks!“—these
were as amazing to him as the fearsome tribes of cyclops,
and the turbulent rivers of liquid gold, and the roc
that could carry an elephant back to its nest,
that other, earlier travelers 6 for.
herodotus swears that far-off tribes of people exist
whose semen is black. and there are 7. flying
mountains. when he journeyed across the 8
gobi desert, marco polo heard of the spirits there, “they
call a man by his name and so lead him astray,” or
one might hear “the tramp and hum of a great
ghost 9 and the sound of drums.” in 1930
when karl jansky heard, for the first time, spritz
and sizzle from his radio 10, he was traveling
—but in time, and for billions of years—and stood there
11 and charmed in the snow of ghosts
we know now are the background radiation of the universe’s
birth from out of nothing. all of those 12 adventurers
challenging the atlantic in a dinghy, or the sky
in a chair and 700 helium balloons . . . can we compare this
on the forty-seventh floor of the empire state building?
how many thousands of miles was it, when my friend dan
left his 16 bed—for better or worse,
the phone was on—and drove for an hour to 17 plain
where the nursing home was, that had called to say
its dim, forensic-smelling halls now held
his mother’s 18? another question is what
my grandpa louie thought, when this photo was taken
in 1958. a little old man, a barely acclimatized immigrant yid
who’s stepped from some joke or textbook example, more
at home with a samovar and a torah and a seder cup
than anything from the buy-4-less. i’m ten,
and out of the frame, as is my 19 llewellyn,
who’s tossed a basketball into the air (and into
the frame), and yelled “hey, catch!” so that
my grandfather—he who has possibly never 20,
much less held, such an object—instinctively grabs it
out of the blue, and stares with a 21 wonder at
this globe of an alien world.
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