David Kirby

Poetry is Full of Uncertainty These Days and For Good Reason

Jazz pianist George Shearing was
waiting to cross a busy intersection when

a man with a white cane tapped him
on the shoulder and asked if Shearing

could help him get to the other side.
Shearing himself was blind from birth,

but as he tells it, he wondered, “What
could I do? I thought a moment, then

took him across. It was the biggest
thrill of my life!” Friend, we need

each other. Give me your arm.
Let’s take one step and then another.

Let us go line by line, stanza by stanza,
poem by poem—these poems of mine

or yours; it doesn’t matter. Something
better awaits us, something much better.

Arundhati Roy says, “Another world
is not only possible, she is on her way.

On a quiet day, I can hear her
breathing.” Friend, let’s go there.

The Night We Met, You Told Me About Marie Curie

 	The first thing you tell me is she wasn’t Jewish.
		But stupid people will always look askance at anyone 
who is female, foreign, and accomplished, you say—she’d 
		already won the Nobel Prize in Physics eight years 
	earlier, and in 1911, her affair with a fellow scientist 
named Paul Langevin became public, so the right-wing 
		press vilified Curie as a foreigner and an atheist, 
	which is pretty hypocritical, you say, since the newspapers

	portrayed her as a godless Jew whenever she won 
		a French prize, though somehow she was hailed as a true 
daughter of France when another country recognized 
		her achievements and she received a foreign prize 
	such as the Nobel. Well, was she an atheist, I say?
No idea, you say, though certainly a foreigner, since 
		she came from Poland, where she studied
	at an underground school called the Flying University that met

	in private homes in Warsaw so that young Poles
		could be free from the warped ideology of their
Russian occupiers. That must have been dangerous,
		I say, and then I remember a story I’d read about
	a mountaineer who’s walking across a Swiss glacier
when he hears a creak beneath his feet and then a crack, 
		like a trap door opening, and he drops, 
	jamming in the ice at belly level, the air punched from his lungs. 

	The lower half of his body is much colder than the top, 
		and of course he kicks in the emptiness until he realizes 
that the movement might dislodge him, so he stops, 
		his toes dangling until his climbing partner hauls him 
	out the way you might pull a drowning man from a pool,
and you say a guy, right? A man? And I say right, 
		a guy, and you say you’d just read an article 
	about all the mammoth carcasses that have been found

	lately, and the thing is, they’re all male. Swallowed 
		by a sinkhole, washed away by a mudflow, drowned 
after falling through thin ice: the males of every species
		tend to do stupid things that end up getting them 
	killed in silly ways, you say, and apparently
that’s true for mammoths as well. Yes, I say, 
		but no danger, no fun—what gives value 
	to travel is fear, according to Camus, and I’m paraphrasing him,

	but you don’t seem to mind, so when we are far 
		from our own country, says Camus, we are seized by fear 
and an instinctive desire to go back to our old habits, 
		and at that moment we are feverish but also porous, 
	so that the slightest touch makes us 
quiver to the depths of our being. At least that’s what 
		I think he said. Feverish, porous, 
	slightest touch: I didn’t mean to, but I’m talking sexy now, 

	though we’ve only just met and I don’t want to 
		scare you off, so I say, okay, back to Marie Curie. Didn’t
she win a second Nobel Prize? And didn’t she die from 
		radiation poisoning? And you say yes, she won 
	another Nobel in 1911, this time in Chemistry, 
and yes, she had the habit of carrying test tubes 
		of radium around in the pocket 
	of her lab coat, and she died of aplastic anemia, which they think

	was caused by prolonged exposure to radiation. 
		She did her job too well, I say, and you nod 
and say