Song: Misplaced

Albert Goldbarth

  *

According to a US poll in the 1990s, 69 percent of Americans believe in angels.
    —Fortean Times

In the late seventies, he told her, the university had rescued two Egyptian mummies from a room under the bleachers of Tulane Stadium, where the two corpses had inadvertently attended three Super Bowls.

    —Heather Pringle, The Mummy Congress

The former nurse who admitted killing 29 patients in New Jersey has donated a kidney to a dying New York man.
    —newspaper report

For I, like you, have gone to sleep assured of my place
in a national body, confident of having melted
into the pot, into the stewing marrows of community,
the 'hood, the pod, the convivial throng, of having passed
the membership test in the Brotherhood
of the Spitting Image, of having safely memorized the watchword
for the Sisterhood of the Group Rate
and the Car Pool and the Wheel-a-Baby Club, of having
signed my name on the bottom lawn, and been issued a key
to the prayer zone and the mosh pit and the dress code

. . . and awakened as an isolate, in a reality
me-big, in a reality empty of angel-corona
and other pervasive alikeness-think.
A rogue / freethinker / secessionist. The archeologist
Johan Reinhard, solitary mountain climber and deft exhumer
of frozen mummies, has said
of his high school days (New Lenox, Illinois),
"From the age of sixteen, none of my friends
could understand my way of thinking
or my way of seeing things." In this, he works

for us the way the movies work for us: to make
of our little interior squinches of feeling
a great exterior symbol. I, like you,
have clambered up a snowy Peruvian peak
—outsider, antinomian, vastly intransigent, naysayer,
ostracon-chooser, iconoclast, visaless,
runt-of-the-herd (or Wordsworth: "lonely
as a cloud")—and cursed and turned my back of necessity
on the dominant culture, and there unearthed
some deep and mysterious beauty. I, like you:

misplaced in anyplace: a bull among china;
a square-head peg in a land of mandated circular fit;
a scribe, perhaps, of an ancient lordly time, deposited
under the bleachers like leftover lumber and puzzling
for all of these years at the alien rituals of crush and cheer
and of treasure beyond any hieroglyphic accounting;
and I, like you, have also been that liver at home
in a system, an intricate polity, of questionable and yet
familiar intent . . . and one night fallen asleep, and awakened
alongside the breath and the heart of an utterly foreign confederacy.