For as long as I could recall.
There was the backyard,
With its dead patch in the shadow.
The cat with its strange meow.
Everything—the doorknobs,
The white clock above the sink,
The open novel (whose title
I can almost read from here)—
Wore that laid-on look, the impasto
Of familiarity.
There was a bolted-down feeling.
Things swung on their hinges
To the right degree, evenings
Came on, and the two of us,
Whoever we were, spoke authentically
Across a little table.
A forest burned somewhere.
The sunsets were appealing.
It was always happening,
Though how I couldn’t say.
But there she was, across
A wood-grained table. It might
Have been happiness: a clock
Somewhere clicking reliably.
The light at the end of the day.
And at dawn, geese in the sky.
Cordell
I drove the tiny, grasshopper-green
Motorcycle to the town’s edge
And, for the first time,
Bought gas, counting out dimes
And quarters to an old guy in a bill cap.
For the first time,
I pondered the venous skin
Of a map and charted a route from Burns Flat
To Cordell, a little town
On the Oklahoma plains. The day
Was sparkling and unrehearsed, the air
Cool in the morning, and, for the first time,
I went out on the public roads alone,
Despite having no license, the world,
For the first time, passing in a rush
At the tips of the handlebars
On the little country road,
A pick-up passing now and then,
The farmer inside raising the index finger
Of his left hand precisely
An inch above the wheel,
A man greeting me
As a man for the first time,
The little engine whirring under me,
The scissortails watching from barbed wire,
The road unspooling for thirty miles
Just as my map had promised, and, for the first time,
I paused to rest on a long journey,
In this case in the town of Corn,
Its sole street signal
Flashing amber at the crossroads
As I sat at a picnic bench
Under the green dinosaur of the Sinclair station,
Staring at the town and the little bike that took me there,
Feeling, for the first time, like a traveler,
A sojourner of the plains—
And I drove on to Bessie, where,
For the first time, I ordered lunch,
Speaking seriously and in what I took
To be a manly way, the way of a sojourner,
To the pretty waitress, and what I’d give
Today to see myself sitting there in terror
Amid the half-dozen farmers eating their chicken-
Fried steak, their untanned foreheads white as halos
Above their sunburned faces, and, for the first time,
I left a tip, counting out a silver gift for her,
And walked out to the bike
That waited for me among pick-ups and tractors,
Moving on, for the first time leaving
A woman behind, someone to watch
And acknowledge how the road pulled me away,
Someone to keep on looking down that road
Long after I’d disappeared, someone who might,
From time to time, look toward the window
And brush the hair from her cheek,
Hearing an engine coming from the distance
That swallowed me, for the first time,
That day long ago, a day which for some reason
I am remembering as I sit sipping coffee
In this roadside café, just another rest stop
On the way to Cordell.
Annulment
It’s a strange place, that city
Of the people who have forgotten me.
It is not the land of the dead, but
Of the living, which is more terrible.
Boys and girls from old playgrounds
Are growing old there. My best friends
And girlfriends, my fellow drones
At the restaurant, the retail stores,
In Boy Scouts, on the track team,
At the language school in Japan,
The cast of thousands who knew me
And laughed with me and had a beer
Or two with me after work, and confessed
To me their perfectly valid realities
As I confessed mine in turn, our lies
And stories mingling, becoming our lives—
They’re mowing the lawn now, or sitting
At a desk, or worrying about their marriages,
Or just walking idly along
In that small city of those who have forgotten me,
Or nearly have, my name sometimes
Gusting across the wide yard of memory
Like a dead leaf, raising a smile,
Or a twinge of regret, or anger,
Or nothing much at all, as their lives
Go on with less of me
By the minute, in that bustling town
I cannot find, somewhere on the plains
Where she is traveling now,
Drawing closer to it every day.
About the Author
George Bilgere is the author of two previous collections of poetry, The Going (University of Missouri Press) and Big Bang (Copper Beech Press). His poems have appeared in such periodicals and anthologies as Poetry, Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, and The Best American Poetry. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Commission, the Witter Bynner Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council, he is a professor of English at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio.
About the Book
The Good Kiss was designed and typeset by Amy Freels. The cover was designed and typeset by Jodi Gabor.
The Good Kiss was printed on 60-pound Natural and bound by BookMasters of Ashland, Ohio.