Swenson Poetry Award

Poems

George Bilgere

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780874215410
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Tenth annual winner of the May Swenson Poetry Award, Haywire is a well-polished collection from a highly accomplished poet. With humor, compassion, and an unflinching eye, Bilgere explores the human condition in accessible lines and a magician's way with language. In images bright and dark, tangible and immanent, Bilgere brings us time after time to the inner reaches of a contemporary life. In subjects ranging from adolescent agony to the loss of parents to the comic pain of middle age, he finds no reason to turn away his gaze, and ultimately no reason not to define himself in joy Haywire was chosen for the Swenson Award by poet Edward Field, winner of numerous awards and a personal friend of the late May Swenson. Field describes the book this way. "This poet, you knew from his very first lines, didn't fall for anything phony—his own language is irresistibly no-bullshit down to earth, even sassy."

I

ARIA

Jussi Bjoerling, that soaring tenor,
Was pulled down from the air.
My father pulled off to the shoulder

And closed his eyes. Nessun Dorma,
It might have been,

or Cielo e Mar.

Hotter than Hades in the car
But I knew enough by then
To shut up. Even my sisters
For once stopped their idiot fidgeting.

Somewhere that summer, Bjoerling
Was dying of booze.
My father had lost a lung. No more
Singing forever.

Through the bridal veil
Of a cigarette, my mother
Stared hard down the highway,
Waiting for it to be over.

BIRDS

You keep reading about them
Vanishing. Or not vanishing,
Exactly, but finding themselves unwelcome.

This morning, for instance,
I stood at the window with my coffee,
Staring across the fields at the new development,
And suddenly heard their silence
From where the trees used to be.
The ruined choirs.

Not one black quarter note
On the drooping measures of the wires.

It was the sound of the new order, half
Breeze in the power lines,
Half ruckus of the highway, that garbage
Disposal of our hunger.

And then,
To make matters worse, a dead bird
Was waiting for me on the sidewalk
As I walked to the CVS
For some more Theraflu.

It always amazes me, the way
Birds seem to have practiced for this
All their lives. Eyes pursed in concentration.
Body cupped in a prayer of wings.

The tiny grip of their claws
On death’s invisible branch.

THIS SUMMER

The big-dick rides have taken over

the Coke-soaked acres

of Great America.

Now your death-defying, one-hour wait

is for Big Dude, or the Tower of Power, or even

the Magnum XL 2000.

Gone

are the hokey thrills of yesteryear,

The furtive, darkly vaginal ones,

like the Haunted House,

which was really

the Tunnel of Love,

which was actually

the Haunted House.

They were too slow.

They took forever.

THE BEAR

The first thing I saw
when I came to visit my friend
in the hospice at the edge of town
was an old woman holding a bear.

She was in a wheelchair on the lawn,
staring out at the lake.
A heavy-set young Candy Striper
was trying to administer some meds
but the woman was nursing her bear
and she wasn’t about to stop.

That’s how life is.
You enter into it from the darkness
of your mother’s womb
and someone hands you a bear.

You hold on for dear life
through nightmares
and a handful of peaceful years.

Then comes a long period of cars and houses,
gardening in the back yard
of that nice bungalow in Des Moines
you and Jim lived in
after he got transferred, sex
passing over you like a fever,
gin and bridge on the porch
in the summer evenings, a war,

and suddenly someone you barely remember
giving birth to one winter
in Chicago, when all the pipes burst,
or was it St. Louis,
is driving you here on a spring afternoon,
the birds singing, everybody
apologizing, finally leaving you

in a wheelchair out on the lawn,
with nothing to do all day but love
your little brown bear, who waited
all this time for you to come home.

THE SURGEON GENERAL

The year he came out with his warning,
like Luther nailing up his theses,
my mother was frying us some salmon cakes
for dinner, or maybe a little Spam,
trying to stretch that dollar
with hominy like white teeth from a can.

Divorce felt like another country.
Suddenly Cassius Clay knocked out
Sonny Liston on our kitchen floor.
My sisters struggled with a Barbie.
Through trees in the back yard
Vietnam moved like bad weather.

In the bathroom a wrinkled girl
with a staple in her navel
presided over my pale,
original boners. 1964.

Somewhere back in St. Louis
lay my pale, original father.
Let the niggers kill each other,
said my mother unto the frying pan,
lighting up yet another
of the million Parliaments
it took to kill her.

THAT’S A TAKE

She’s just finished mourning for us all
the fact that spring is here
above the buzz and clatter of this crowded café

where I have stopped reading the paper
because it’s impolite to do anything
while Ella Fitzgerald is singing.

And in the pause that follows, I imagine her
turning away from the bright, entranced
face of the microphone,
kidding with the sound technicians

while putting on her hat and a pale green sweater
before she steps out of the studio
and into a spring day as it played out
in 1951, the year I was born,

stopping on the way home at a little deli
to pick up something for supper,
turning words like macaroni
and potato salad
into tiny American songs
for the pimply kid behind the counter

who thinks nothing of it,
who has his own problems,
who bears his own secret beauty through the world.

SIMILE PRACTICE

When I taught English as a Second Language
the whole class sat down every night
in the Adult Education Classroom
and talked about the strange creature,
the big, unruly language I offered them.

English sound like plastic click together!
said the Vietnamese girl in a voice
like bits of breaking plastic.

Like lot of cricket everywhere,
said the weird kid from Korea,
permane...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Content
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Epigraph
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• About the Author
• The May Swenson Poetry Award