There's Something About Poopy

This was in the much-maligned "Best American Poetry" series which, when you think about it, is just as unassumingly pretentious yet still accurate as "America's Got Talent." 


But I took a volume with me on a summer trip to Ukraine and read it front to back to front at least twice, since it was one of the few books I had with me. Here's one whose vivid descriptions and gross tenderness rivals some of the more graphic Chuck Palahniuk. Now you can take a shower to get that feeling off of you.

Albert Goldbarth

The Gold Star

Elaine's job on the geriatric ward included encouraging
the constipated to loose their stingy, gnarled marbles
into the bowl - by hand: there wasn't anything more tenderly
conducive than an orderly's gloved fingers.
There's nothing redeeming in his. Simply: she
needed the pay, they needed her excavating
(literally: from out / of their cavities) help.
The rest? - "an alien stink that followed me home,
under my toenails, in my hair." But surely we'd do it
willingly for someone that we loved . . . yes? Even
gratefully - for someone that we loved. And then 
we'd clean the pad, we'd rinse it free of its gobbets
the size and color of cornelian cherries . . . 
gladly, yes? Gladly and changed. Better;
tested. Even when my mother was dying,
shrinking, growing hard rosettes
as if her lungs were tanks in an experiment . . .
didn't I tend to her? and wasn't it the way
it always used to be? - that with precision instinct
she'd arranged this just so that she could prove
to relatives and neighbors that her son
was so caring, her son was the best. I'd wring
the compress, set it on her forehead again.
What a good boy I was!




And 'cause I had to look 'em up:


Cornelian is a reddish-brown mineral.
Rosettes are small, circular devices usually  tied to a medal.