Albert Goldbarth

C K N S

Natural State

I’ m sitting at Nathan’ s, reading a biography of Darwin
who, right now, is dissecting a barnacle

“no bigger than a pinhead (and with two penises)”:
he’ ll work like this on barnacles, his wrists supported

by rigged-up blocks of workshop wood, for eight years.
Nathan is reading too, in the worn-down banged-up “daddy chair”:

those philosophical poems of William Bronk’ s. What’ s
most delightful is that Tristan, eleven, and Aidan, ten,