The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots, Ned Balbo’s sixth book of poems, inhabits that twilight, “the hour of dark and not-dark,” when the rising of the moon traces the arc of memory, and we ask ourselves, “What else are we given?” From a crow’s orbit and a hawk’s descent to desire, love, and heartbreak, these poems range widely in their search for the sacred, whether visible to the eye or buried, waiting to be discovered, like all that “the dark still holds.” The trove unearthed includes a sister lost to the author by adoption, speaking from a parallel life that could have been his own; an abandoned daughter who, in an earlier decade, dreams of distant Pluto; and the compass that once belonged to the poet’s birth father, the mute artifact of lost connections. A conspiracy theorist casts doubt on the moon landing; Saint Joseph grieves at the loss of his son to the suffering God has planned; and a figure in Bosch’s triptych, despite an afterlife of torment, fondly recalls the earthly delights he savored.Through brief lyrics and longer narratives in a variety of forms, we see that time is “unforgiving/yet not merciless,” and that even when we draw back—like the touch-me-not plants whose leaves withdraw “like seawater parted by the wind”—our need to touch and to be touched is universal.
