Albert Goldbarth
Arkansas River
Wichita, Kansas
By Amy Barnes
For thirty years, I’ve had the closing line of a poem stuck in my head: “snow fills all the empty graves.” My creative writing teacher at Wichita State University read the poem to an eager circle of young writers. It’s an evocative image of community, grief, emptiness, frigid midwestern winters in a way like no other poem or prose I’ve read. I periodically searched for the impactful words without success.
I spent my childhood in Kansas. School didn’t close when it snowed, and the mail came like clockwork through wind, snow, and sleet. My adult life, married and with children, has been in a series of Southern states, where a light jacket serves in January, and inches of snow keep the mailman away for a week.
My mother recently sent me a book of photographs from my colder childhood years in the Midwest — mostly images of me standing awkwardly next to boyfriends while wearing gaudy, poofy 80s prom dresses. My own adult children are now the same age I was in the photos. But there were also peripheral surprises in the snapshots: grandparents, my first car, first bike, first date, a Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlor.
In one image, I’m caught mid-twirl holding hands with one of those young men, in the middle of the frozen Arkansas River in downtown Wichita. It was more than a sheet of ice that winter. It was thick and turned into a temporary ice-skating rink for lovers and ducks alike.
For the first time since 1996, I recently went back to the region, in part to promote my Belle Point Press collection Child Craft at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, a creative writer’s conference in Kansas City, Missouri. In Tennessee, where I live, there was an unexpected seven inches of snow that paralyzed the area. By contrast, Kansas City was temperate and dry.
In 1991, I was still enrolled at Wichita State University taking creative writing courses from the venerable Albert Goldbarth as a 20-something with little writing and even less life experience. He spoke eloquently of snow, grief and people, read his own poetry aloud to the class, and critiqued our fledgling attempts at imitation. All in a circle. Like mourners around an empty winter grave that stood poetically in my head for decades.
While prolific, Goldbarth is resolutely reclusive. I went in search of that memorable poem, one that I thought was his. While I didn’t locate that specific poem, I came across something in my searches that felt more relevant. The non-fiction piece “These Quiet Poems” by Rick Mulkey and Susan Tekulve appeared in The Georgia Review. The authors open by talking about being Goldbarth’s students two decades earlier, perhaps even when I was also a student. They’re walking along the same Arkansas River that I once ice skated on with a long-ago beau. Goldbarth takes them to a series of his installed, poetic plaques etched in stone that read:
“Snow. Rain. Stream. Sea.
Dew. Mist. Boiled for tea.
The life of water never ends.
It merely has different bodies.”
Those simple words, lined up like a Burma Shave advertisement, summed up everything I felt once I got to AWP: a sense of place, different bodies of water/snow/self, poetry, a return to a new/old home, reading Albert Goldbarth differently three decades apart. Skating on an iced-over pond in my 20s. Writing in my 20s. Writing in my 50s.
At the conference, Goldbarth and I texted briefly, in the same state for a moment. We crossed paths — riding the pink Barbie trolley in opposite directions. We both had off-site readings ironically at the exact same time, a few miles apart. When I asked about the poetry that had eaten at my thoughts for years, he had a quick answer: Maxine Kumin.
I left Kansas City with that name. When I got home, I found myself entranced by not just that one poem I’d sought out, but also her other stunning work — on grief, loss, change, community, war, snow, and life. She died a few years ago, but I discovered so much exploring the profound words she left behind. It was a fitting end to my literary quest only a few hundred miles from where it began.
Those boys buried in plastic photo album sleeves are scattered like snowflakes now and I’ve mailed copies of my collections to the professor, before our empty graves are filled.
Amy Cipolla Barnes is the author of three collections: Mother Figures, Ambrotypes, and Child Craft (Belle Point Press, 2023). She has words at Spartan Lit, Leon Review, Complete Sentence, The Bureau Dispatch, Nurture Lit, X-R-A-Y Lit, McSweeney’s, -ette review, Smokelong Quarterly, The Rumpus, and many other sites. Her writing has been long-listed for the Wigleaf Top50 in 2021-2024, included in Best Microfiction 2025, and The Best Small Fictions, 2022. She’s a Fractured Lit Associate Editor, Gone Lawn co-editor, Ruby Lit assistant editor, Narratively Chief Submissions Reader and course instructor, and also reads for The MacGuffin.
