March 26, 2024

George Bilgere

CHEAP MOTELS OF MY YOUTH

They lay somewhere between
the Sleeping In The Car era
and my current and probably final era,
the Best Western or Courtyard Marriott era.
 
The Wigwam. Log Cabin. Kozy Komfort
Hiway House. Star Lite. The Lazy A.
 
Just off the interstate, the roar
of the sixteen-wheelers all night long.
The dented tin door opening to the parking lot,
the broken coke machine muttering to itself.
 
“Color TV.” “Free HBO.” “Hang Yourself
in Our Spacious Closets.” A job interview
at some lost-in-the-middle-of-nowhere
branch campus of some agricultural college
devoted to the research and development
of the soybean and related by-products.
 
Five-course teaching load, four of them
Remedial Comp. Candidate
must demonstrate familiarity
with the basic tenets of Christian faith.
Chance of getting the job
one in a hundred. Lip-sticked
cigarette butt under the bed.
Toilet seat with its paper band,
“Sanitized for Your Protection,”
dead roach floating in the bowl.
 
As the free HBO
flickers in the background,
you stare in the cracked mirror
at a face too young, too full of hope
to deserve this. And you wait
for the Courtyard Marriott era to arrive.
 

from Cheap Motels of My Youth
2023 Rattle Chapbook Prize Winner

__________

George Bilgere: “When I was eight years old my parents got divorced. My mother packed her three kids into an old Chevy station wagon and drove us from St. Louis to Riverside, California, looking for a fresh start. She had visited there when she was an Army nurse stationed in LA during the war and fell in love with the place. That cross-country car trip, full of cheap diners, cheap hotels, and desperation, changed my life. I fell in love with the vastness and beauty, the glamor and tawdriness, of America. I’ve travelled all over the country since then, on that ancient and deeply American quest, the search for home.” (web)

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March 13, 2024

George Bilgere

MISTING

is the one thing involving flowers
I’m reasonably good at. Daybreak
finds me in the yard with my hose,
attentive as a bee. What a pleasure
to choose “Mist” on my watering gun
and drift like a cloud above the roses.
Last month my sister died, a storm
of lightning in her brain. And now
this news that someone who once
was the object of all my bouquets
is spending her final summer.
Each day brings more bad weather,
which is another way of saying
I’m in my sixties. But here, in the frail
September morning, my hand tipped in fog,
the flowers lift their faces to me
with bright, mystifying questions,
and for once I have an answer.
 

from Cheap Motels of My Youth
2023 Rattle Chapbook Prize Winner

__________

George Bilgere: “When I was eight years old my parents got divorced. My mother packed her three kids into an old Chevy station wagon and drove us from St. Louis to Riverside, California, looking for a fresh start. She had visited there when she was an Army nurse stationed in LA during the war and fell in love with the place. That cross-country car trip, full of cheap diners, cheap hotels, and desperation, changed my life. I fell in love with the vastness and beauty, the glamor and tawdriness, of America. I’ve travelled all over the country since then, on that ancient and deeply American quest, the search for home.” (web)

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February 13, 2023

George Bilgere

PALIMPSEST

We’re bicycling through the Tiergarten
on a summer morning in Berlin,
my wife and I, our son in his bike seat,
and it really is a lovely day, except
someone has spray painted in red,
dripping cursive on the marble pedestals
of the statues of the great poets
and composers scattered around the park, 
Juden Raus, Jews Out, and my first thought 
is, hey, my German is getting better, 
I figured that out right away, 
even though the handwriting is poor,
but of course the author was working
in the dark, and under a certain pressure, 
so really, you can’t blame him, and besides,
the quality of the handwriting isn’t
the point here, nor is my progress
in German, which in most respects
has been disappointing. The point
is that we have a bottle of wine
and some ham and cheese sandwiches
and we’re going to make the best of it,
we’re going to spread the blanket
and have a picnic here in the not entirely
new Germany, that bad last century
still bleeding into this one, blood
still soaking the feet of the poets,
while our little boy, new to history,
runs laughing under a blazing sun 
through the green illiterate meadows.
 

from Rattle #78, Winter 2022
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

__________

George Bilgere: “One day last summer my five-year-old son walked in from the backyard and dropped a pill bug on the dining room table where I was eating my scrambled eggs. ‘Pill bugs are the dinosaurs of the backyard,’ he told me gravely. And I thanked him, because now I had an idea for a new poem. As anyone who has kids knows, they are born poets. The trick is to help them hold onto it as the distractions of adulthood loom.” (web)

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January 14, 2022

George Bilgere

CALL OF THE FOX

The summer we rented the cottage in the woods
we would waken in the middle of the night
to the mating call of the foxes, 

which sounds like one of my freshmen
barfing up hot dogs and Wild Turkey
after his first frat party, a sound
that makes you want to puke yourself
out of sympathy or sheer disgust
with the whole situation, 

how the imperatives of desire
drive us into the dark woods,
sick with the incandescent
loneliness of the flesh.

However, after listening for a while, 
my wife remarked
that it was actually kind of funny, 

as if nature, usually so careful 
about beauty, about getting it just right, 
had for once screwed up, 
and created something even
Mary Oliver couldn’t get behind. 

And then we thought, 
well, since we’re up anyway,
and there’s nothing else to do …

Which is why my wife
is my wife.

from Rattle #74, Winter 2021

__________

George Bilgere: “We had a pretty lousy spring. A disaster of a spring. The season of new life became a time of strange and frightening death. But when summer finally arrived I felt it was time for a change. Maybe it’s a cliché, but I felt it was time for something life-affirming. And for me that’s always been poetry. Like pretty much everyone else my family and I stayed put this summer, and I spent the long weeks and months reading and writing. I realized once again that in difficult times poetry can sustain me. I read Neruda. I read Rilke. I read my dear friend who has passed away, Tony Hoagland. Dorianne Laux and Barbara Crooker. Set against the backdrop of the pandemic, the poems I read burned with a strange new life. Instead of the immensity of the tragedy dwarfing poetry, it infused it with a tremendous new vitality for me. It kept me going.” (web)

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May 29, 2020

George Bilgere

NO PROBLEM

I sit here aging at the streetside café,
giving off the sickly yellow smoke of decay
while people walk by pretending
not to notice, glancing away
into the distance or down at their phones,
doing their best out of politeness or shock
to ignore me sitting here aging,
and I don’t blame them, it’s hard to watch.

And now the waitress in her burning beauty,
her lustrous incandescent womanhood,
walks up to me in a radiant cloud of youth
and asks if I want another iced latte macchiato.

But I’m aging so fast, I’m racing so quickly
through time I can barely hear her, and furthermore
I know what she really wants to say is,
your aging is kind of gross, kind of a turnoff,
maybe you could go do it somewhere else
where it doesn’t frighten the customers, and besides,
it’s not like there’s anything I can do about it.

And as I sit here with my skin peeling off
and crumpling up like toilet paper
and my hair falling out on the table
and my teeth rotting and my bones
turning to glass and all my organs drowning
in the sludge of age, I croak to her
as she floats in the cool creamy oasis
of her youthful lustrousness, I do manage to croak, yeah,
another iced latte macchiato would be great.

And from 90 million light-years away,
from the beautiful bountiful burning galaxy
of her late teens, she says to the fast-decaying,
maybe starting to smell bad, just about to be
covered with flies old leathery carcass I’m becoming,
No problem.

Except that there is, actually,
a problem.

from Rattle #67, Spring 2020

__________

George Bilgere: “Every summer my wife and two little boys and I travel to Berlin, Germany, for three glorious months. In the mornings I wander down the shady little street we live on and sit with my notebook at an outdoor cafe improbably called Shlomo’s Coffee and Bagels. I order a coffee, open my notebook, and for the next two hours or so I sit there hoping a poem will find me. These are the happiest moments of my life, even when the poem I’m waiting for stands me up.” (web)

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May 27, 2020

George Bilgere

CHERNOBYL

I wish I were in Chernobyl today.
The streets are peaceful there.
No cars or bicycles rush by, no one
is late for work.
There are no children
laughing on the playground
or getting into trouble.

The file cabinets
in the police department
are full of mice,
and the outcome of the important vote
at the General Assembly
doesn’t matter.

There are plenty of vacancies
at the brand-spanking-new state prison,
and for once, no one
is talking in the library.
Not even a dog is out today
pursuing important errands.

Life in my city is tiring.
Deadlines and unread books.
Making love, or dinner.
So many people to disappoint,
so much to buy in the supermarket.
Almost unbearable, this city.

But today in Chernobyl
the clocks have given up.
Nobody monitors the phones,
and every night the movie theater
shows the same old silent film.

Does anyone have a question?
No.

The houses of Chernobyl tend their silences,
and on the dinner table
two gray sandwiches are waiting
with such quiet patience.
Like an old married couple.

from Rattle #67, Spring 2020

__________

George Bilgere: “Every summer my wife and two little boys and I travel to Berlin, Germany, for three glorious months. In the mornings I wander down the shady little street we live on and sit with my notebook at an outdoor cafe improbably called Shlomo’s Coffee and Bagels. I order a coffee, open my notebook, and for the next two hours or so I sit there hoping a poem will find me. These are the happiest moments of my life, even when the poem I’m waiting for stands me up.” (web)

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June 6, 2018

George Bilgere

BIG THING

Did you hear about Gary?
His new book is supposed to be big.
People are already talking Badger Prize.
Maybe even the Bexley. That’s right, I said the Bexley.

Which is fine. I’m happy for him.
It’s just that I’m feeling a little blindsided here.
I mean, when we had breakfast last summer
I said, you know, how’s it going,
and he was kind of, oh, business as usual,
one foot in front of the other, that sort of thing.
I think he talked about getting his lawn aerated.
Nothing about a book. Nothing about something Big.

My point being,
this new book is supposed to be a game changer,
and for the last couple of years
he’s had this secret knowledge,
this private awareness of his Big Thing
while the rest of us were basically coasting,
thinking, Gary’s just out daydreaming on the deck
or texting his daughter or whatever.

And now we have this sense of
Life Having Been Frittered Away,
of being bit players in the Larger Drama Of Gary,
who may not be the most talented guy,
but admittedly he has a solid work ethic,
an ability to see things through,
however uninspired the work itself may be.

So yes, there is this feeling of betrayal,
like the rest of us let our guard down
while he was doing his Big Thing,
this sense of Why Are We Even Here
Except To Provide a Backdrop For Gary’s Triumph,
or
This Is So Not Why I Got My MFA.

from Rattle #59, Spring 2018

__________

George Bilgere: “Long, long ago, when I was a struggling biology major, I took an elective course in modern poetry just to give myself a break from chemistry and physiology. The first poem the professor showed us was James Wright’s great ‘Autumn Comes to Martins Ferry, Ohio.’ Boom! So much for chemistry and physiology. Thank you, James Wright, for leading me down the road (almost) not taken.” (web)

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