The Good Kiss
Akron Series in Poetry
Winner of the 2001 Akron Poetry Prize
ALSO BY GEORGE BILGERE
Big Bang
The Going
AKRON SERIES IN POETRY
Elton Glaser, Editor
Barry Seiler, The Waters of Forgetting
Raeburn Miller, The Comma After Love: Selected Poems of Raeburn Miller
William Greenway, How the Dead Bury the Dead
Jon Davis, Scrimmage of Appetite
Anita Feng, Internal Strategies
Susan Yuzna, Her Slender Dress
Raeburn Miller, The Collected Poems of Raeburn Miller
Clare Rossini, Winter Morning with Crow
Barry Seiler, Black Leaf
William Greenway, Simmer Dim
Jeanne E. Clark, Ohio Blue Tips
Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Never Be the Horse
Marlys West, Notes for a Late-Blooming Martyr
Dennis Hinrichsen, Detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights
Susan Yuzna, Pale Bird, Spouting Fire
John Minczeski, Circle Routes
Barry Seiler, Frozen Falls
Melody Lacina, Private Hunger
George Bilgere, The Good Kiss
William Greenway, Ascending Order
The Good Kiss
Poems by
George Bilgere
The University of Akron Press
Akron, Ohio
Copyright © 2002 by George Bilgere
Some of the poems in this volume have appeared in or are forthcoming in the following journals: Atlanta Review: “Annulment” (published as “Anniversary”); Denver Quarterly: “Ike”; Field: “Stupid,” “Jennifer,” “Cordell”; The Journal: “Old Man River”; Missouri Review: “Pain,” “Eden,” “Nectarines,” “Anywhere”; Ploughshares: “The Good Kiss” (published as “Almost the Same”); Sewanee Review: “Like Riding a Bicycle,” “Laundry,” “Let Down”; Southern Review: “Crusoe,” “Threepenny Opera”; Tar River Poetry: “Corned Beef and Cabbage,” “The Garage,” “Satisfied.”
All rights reserved. First Edition 2002.
11 10 09 5 4
All inquiries and permissions requests should be addressed to the publisher, The University of Akron Press, Akron, OH 44325–1703
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bilgere, George, 1951—
The good kiss : poems / by George Bilgere.— 1st ed.
p. cm. — (Akron series in poetry)
ISBN 1-884836-92-5 (alk. paper) — ISBN 1-884836-93-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ePDF 978-1-935603-26-8 ePub 978-1-935603-37 5
I. Title. II. Series.
PS3552.I425 G66 2002
811'.54—Dc21
2002014834
Manufactured in the United States of America.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984.∞
Cover painting: Edvard Munch: The Kiss 1892, Oil on canvas 73 x 92 cm, National Gallery, Oslo. Artwork © Munch Museum/Munch-Ellingsen Group/ARS 2007. Photo © Munch Museum (Andersen/de Jong).
Contents
Like Riding a Bicycle
Corned Beef and Cabbage
Crusoe
Jennifer
Great Cathedrals
What I Want
Anywhere
Magellan
Tamed
Eden
Westward Ho
St. Paul’s
Elegy for the LP
Let Down
Night Flight
Stupid
The Garage
Nectarines
Threepenny Opera
Denver
Pain
Wind Turbines
The Good Kiss
Blues for Cleveland
Laundry
Inherit the Wind
Ike
Mockingbird
August
Nevada
Mysterious Island
Old Man River
Divorce
Retrospective
Cordell
Annulment
For Cec
Like Riding a Bicycle
I would like to write a poem
About how my father taught me
To ride a bicycle one soft twilight,
A poem in which he was tired
And I was scared, unable to disbelieve
In gravity and believe in him,
As the fireflies were coming out
And only enough light remained
For one more run, his big hand at the small
Of my back, pulling away like the gantry
At a missile launch, and this time, this time
I wobbled into flight, caught a balance
I would never lose, and pulled away
From him as he eased, laughing, to a stop,
A poem in which I said that even today
As I make some perilous adult launch,
Like pulling away from my wife
Into the fragile new balance of our life
Apart, I can still feel that steadying hand,
Still hear that strong voice telling me
To embrace the sweet fall forward
Into the future’s blue
Equilibrium. But,
Of course, he was drunk that night,
Still wearing his white shirt
And tie from the office, the air around us
Sick with scotch, and the challenge
Was keeping his own balance
As he coaxed his bulk into a trot
Beside me in the hot night, sweat
Soaking his armpits, the eternal flame
Of his cigarette flaring as he gasped
And I fell, again and again, entangled
In my gleaming Schwinn, until
He swore and stomped off
Into the house to continue
Working with my mother
On their own divorce, their balance
Long gone and the hard ground already
Rising up to smite them
While I stayed outside in the dark,
Still falling, until at last I wobbled
Into the frail, upright delight
Of feeling sorry for myself, riding
Alone down the neighborhood’s
Black street like the lonely western hero
I still catch myself in the act
Of performing.
And yet, having said all this,
I must also say that this summer evening
Is very beautiful, and I am older
Than my father ever was
As I coast the Pacific shoreline
On my old bike, the gears clicking
Like years, the wind
Touching me for the first time, it seems,
In a very long time,
With soft urgency all over.
Corned Beef and Cabbage
I can see her in the kitchen,
Cooking up, for the hundredth time,
A little something from her
Limited Midwestern repertoire.
Cigarette going in the ashtray,
The red wine pulsing in its glass,
A warning light meaning
Everything was simmering
Just below the steel lid
Of her smile, as she boiled
The beef into submission,
Chopped her way
Through the vegetable kingdom
With the broken-handled knife
I use tonight, feeling her
Anger rising from the dark
Chambers of the head
Of cabbage I slice through,
Missing her, wanting
To chew things over
With my mother again.
Crusoe
When you’ve been away from it long enough,
You begin to forget the country
Of couples, with all its strange customs
And mysterious ways. Those two
Over there, for instance: late thirties,
Attractive and well-dressed, reading
At the table, drinking some complicated
Coffee drink. They haven’t spoken
Or even looked at each other in thirty minutes,
But the big toe of her right foot, naked
In its sandal, sometimes grazes
The naked ankle bone of his left foot,
The faintest signal, a line thrown
Between two vessels as they cruise
Through this hour, this vacation, this life,
Through the thick novels they’re reading,
Her toe saying to his ankle,
Here’s to the whole improbable story
Of our meeting, of our life together
And the oceanic richness
Of our mingled narrative
With its complex past, with its hurts
And secret jokes, its dark closets
And delightful sexual quirks,
Its occasional doldrums, its vast
Future we have already peopled
Compared to that man sitting across the room,
Marooned with his drink
And yellow notebook, trying to write
A way off his little island.
Jennifer
I step naked into the backyard
Under a full moon
And piss on the rich soil
At the edge of the flower bed,
Feeling both Whitmanesque and doglike,
Mystical and silly.
When I was a kid, my friends and I
Would pee together, crossing
Yellow swords,
Seeing who could go longest and farthest.
And over the years,
Three or four women have asked shyly
If they could watch
What might have seemed to them
The essential male act: brutish
And comic, complexly hydraulic,
Full of archaic territoriality—
The one act of the penis
Over which we have more control
Than they do.
Maybe that’s why,
When I walked home a little buzzed
From a Denver bar one winter night
With a girl I hardly knew
And desperately needing a convenient tree,
She took me in her cold hand
And wrote her own name in the snow.
Great Cathedrals
Before a date, my college roommate
Used to drive his candy-apple red Camaro
Down to the car wash and spend the afternoon
Washing, waxing, vacuuming it,
Detailing the chrome strips, buffing the fenders,
Spraying the big expensive tires
With their raised white lettering
That said something like Intruder
Or Marauder, with a silicone spray
Until they were slick and dark as sex.
He polished that car as if each caress,
Each pass of the chamois, each loving
Stroke of the terry cloth would increase,
By measurable degrees,
The likelihood that in the immaculate
Front seat, with its film of freshly applied
Vinyl cleaner, at the end of a cul-de-sac
Somewhere above the campus,
She would consent to be rubbed
And buffed just as lovingly.
We do what we can,
And if God is no more impressed
By the cathedral at Chartres
Than by a righteously clean and cherry
Camaro, at least He can’t say
We haven’t tried
With all our might to conceal our fear
That we have little else to offer
Than stained glass or polished chrome,
The elbow grease of our good intentions.
So I’m happy to see
That in the Christmas card photo he sent
Mark stands, balding now,
With a dignified gut, a pretty wife,
And a couple of nice-looking kids, in front
Of the great cathedral
Like the sweet vision of a future
He’d been vouchsafed one day
Long ago, through Turtle Wax
On a gleaming hubcap.
What I Want
for my marriage, 1996–2000
I want a good night’s sleep.
I want to get up without feeling
That to waken is to plunge through a trap door.
I want to ride my motorcycle
In late spring through the Elysian Fields
Of the Rocky Mountains
And lie once more with Cecelia
In the summer of 1985
On a blanket in the backyard of our house
In Denver and watch the clouds expand.
And it would be great to see my mother
Alive again, at the stove, frying a pan of noodles
Into that peculiar carbonized disk that has never been replicated.
I would like for my ex-wife to get leprosy,
Her beauty falling away in little chunks
To the disgust of everyone in the chic café
Where she exercises her gift
For doing absolutely nothing.
I want world peace.
I want to come home one evening
And find that Julia, the new assistant professor
In the history department,
Has let herself into my apartment
On the history of lingerie.
I don’t ask for much: a good merlot.
An afternoon thunderstorm cooling off
The city as I sit listening to Ella
Sing “Spring is Here,” so the air goes lyrical
And perhaps a stray bolt of lightning
Strikes my ex-wife as she steps from her car,
Setting her on fire, to the unqualified delight
Of the friends she has come to visit,
Who are thoroughly sick of her self-aggrandizing stories.
I want to spark a bowl of Maui Wowie
And spend the entire afternoon in my dorm room
With Corrine Spellman, trying to remember
What we were talking about, wondering
Whether, in fact, we had had sex yet.
I’d like to sit at the little outdoor restaurant
By the lake in Forest Park, talking with my aunt
In the humid summer twilight, as the hot
St. Louis day expires upon the water
And the moth-eaten Chinese lanterns
Glow like faded Kodachrome.
We would argue about the great tenor voices
Of the century, or causes for the dearth
Of poetry about the Gulf War,
Or why my father drank himself into an elegy
We never stop revising,
While couples on their paddleboats come in
From the darkening lake, as they’ve done
Since the beginning of time, and children
Call each other across the shadowy fields.
Yes, that would be nice.
I want a good woman
With a sweet bosom
And a wicked sense of humor.
I want to wake up in London on a spring morning
And read in the paper that my ex-wife
Has received a lethal injection, courtesy of the state
Of Ohio, as part of a citywide progra
m aimed
At improving the civic pride of Cleveland,
But something went terribly wrong
And she’s been left in a persistent
Vegetative state
Which everyone agrees
Is nonetheless an improvement.
And it would be wonderful
To sit down with Maria
At our favorite restaurant in Madrid
With some good red wine
And listen to her Spanish
Caress the evening.
I want to read that a new manuscript
Of poetry by James Wright
Has been discovered in someone’s attic,
And someone I haven’t yet met,
In some future I have yet to despoil,
Has bought it for my birthday,
And after the kids are asleep
We sit out in the backyard,
A little drunk, and read it
Aloud to each other,
Something we often do
In summer, before climbing upstairs to the bedroom
In the big old house we love so much.
Anywhere
The boy’s been on the computer all morning
Playing virtual baseball, July
Sliding by in a huge yellow silence
Beyond the window as he clicks the keyboard
To send the phantom players running
The base paths under a virtual sky
In a nameless city’s digital summer.
Naturally, I brood about this as I work
In the garage at fixing his bike’s
Out-of-whack derailleur. In my day,
I find myself starting to say, before
My father’s fossil phrase
Catches in my craw—
Better to speak with this tool in my hand,
This old-fashioned screwdriver,
Its Phillips head buried in the steel
Crux of the material world, the torque
Flowing from my old-fashioned wrist
So chain will rise from sprocket, and power
From a boy’s legs will carry him from home
And down the afternoon street to nowhere
In particular, or anywhere: places
I used to head for on a summer day.
Magellan
When a beautiful woman lies down
On her brown belly, on her pink beach towel,
And reaches back and behind to perform
That curious legerdemain whereby
Her dazzling white
Bikini top is undone
And she stretches out under the sun,