Michigan Today NewsE Poetry Feature
Two Poems by Laurence Goldstein:
WHO AM I?
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Mister, you can see I need work.
I’m a pre-industrial serf, unskilled
in robot tool-and-die, spiteful about
the way a punch-press crushes a head,
a blade shears an arm, a leg is drilled.
You know what it’s like, putting a finger
into the clammy hole of a garbage disposal,
that’s my squeamish feeling every day
I contemplate the sharp edges of our culture.
I’m pleased we’re entering a post-industrial
phase; I have hard-won talents for this one:
a programmer’s savvy, an eye for moving pictures,
a willingness to amuse the privileged class.
Sure, I’ll stack boxes in your warehouse
but, fair warning, I won’t be satisfied,
I’ll seek advancement when the system
suffers downtime in the blackout of self-doubt.
Misfits can be model citizens, too.
Till the space age worker’s paradise
welfares me or gives me more power,
I’ll slander it with epigrammatic skill
and wait for the oil to run out. I mean, why
put my underclass shoulder to the flywheel?
Another wheel is driving the managers down
their kibitzers up. The blade is sharper.
Mister, I’ve had centuries of practice
biding my time. Show me where to sign my name.
FIRMAMENT ON HIGH
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Once, we loved our sister satellite.
Desert Endymions hot to shoot off,
we fashioned Cadillacs of ascent
to touch her dry Sea of Serenity.
What we thought heroic, wasn’t.
Our old moon, Sagan said is “boring,”
like police photos of gelid bodies
icepicked in the heart or neck.
Mars is a nastier myth, but
more heimisch for some latter-day
atom-energized Voyager
to lay by, the better to fly by
and finally, beyond Pluto, settle among
Eocene forms not yet imagined,
not humdrum, resourceful as rodents,
“intelligent life” we fondly call it,
meaning, smart enough to welcome us
their destiny, but smarter that us too,
having no need for cinemas, jails,
or moving vans to find out what they are.
Professor Goldstein explored the beginning of a little-examined
tradition in American verse—poems about the movies—in
his book The American Poet at the Movies: A Critical History,
published by University of Michigan Press in 1994.
A lifelong movie lover and a native of Culver City, California,
Hollywood’s backyard, Goldstein grew up close to the backlot
of the Selznick studio, where the facade of Tara, the plantation
house in “Gone With The Wind,” was stored. He and friends
occasionally climbed the fence to play hide-and-seek among the abandoned
ruins of movie history.
Goldstein is also the author of The Flying Machine and Modern Literature (1986) and three volumes of poetry.
Laurence Goldstein's homepage
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