George Bilgere

June 6, 2018

“Big Thing” by George BilgerePosted by

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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October 30, 2017

“Pancake Dilemma” by George BilgerePosted by

George Bilgere

PANCAKE DILEMMA

Another subway station blows up in Europe,
it’s right there on the front page,
and I’m about to pour some syrup on my pancakes.

But perhaps I shouldn’t be doing this.
Maybe I should just put the syrup down
out of respect for the victims and their families.

Yet who is there to witness my sacrifice,
my gesture of solidarity, however small, 
with the international community?

My wife is playing with our son in the living room.
I’m at the table by myself, and I could just go ahead
and pour the syrup and smear on some butter
and think compassionately about the victims
while eating the pancakes while they’re hot.
No one will benefit from my eating cold pancakes.

Instead, I call out to my wife from the dining room,
“Another subway station blew up in Europe,
they think it’s terrorists,” but she doesn’t hear me,
the TV’s turned up for Paw Patrol.

So I just sit here quietly for a moment,
then start eating the pancakes,
trying not to enjoy them too much.

—from Rattle #57, Fall 2017
Tribute to Rust Belt Poets

__________

George Bilgere: “I’ve lived here in the scenic Rust Belt for 25 years. Not half my life, but long enough to have seen a lot of rust. Although I grew up in California I was actually born in St. Louis and lived there until I was ten. St. Louis is just as ‘Rust Belt’ as Cleveland. So I guess that yes, I self-identify as a Rust-Belter. But the fact is that I really don’t write much poetry about that.” (website)

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August 9, 2016

“Unwise Purchases” by George BilgerePosted by

George Bilgere

UNWISE PURCHASES

They sit around in the house
Not doing much of anything: the boxed set
Of the complete works of Verdi, unopened.
The complete Proust, unread.
The French cut silk shirts
Which hang like expensive ghosts in the closet,
And make me look exactly
Like the kind of middle-aged man
Who would wear a French cut silk shirt.

The reflector telescope I thought would unlock
The mysteries of the heavens
But which I used only once or twice,
And which now stares disconsolately at the ceiling
When it could be examining the Crab Nebula.

The 30-day course in Spanish,
Whose text I barely opened,
Whose dozen cassette tapes remain unplayed,
Save for Tape One, where I never learned
Whether the suave American,
Conversing with a sultry-sounding desk clerk
At a Spanish hotel about the possibility
Of obtaining a room,
Actually managed to check in. I like to think
That one thing led to another between them
And that by Tape Six or so

They’re happily married
And raising a bilingual child in Seville or Terra Haute.

But I’ll never know.

Suddenly I realize
I have constructed the perfect home
For a sexy, Spanish-speaking astronomer
Who reads Proust while listening to Italian arias,
And I wonder if somewhere in this teeming city
There lives a woman with, say,
A fencing foil gathering dust in the corner
Near her unused easel, a rainbow
Of oil paints drying in their tubes
On the table where the violin lies entombed
In the permanent darkness of its locked case
Next to the dusty chess set,

A woman who has always dreamed of becoming
The kind of woman the man I’ve dreamed of becoming
Has always dreamed of meeting,

And while the two of them discuss star clusters
And Cezanne, while they fence delicately
In Castilian Spanish to the strains of Rigoletto,

She and I will stand in the steamy kitchen,
Fixing up a little risotto,
Enjoying a modest cabernet
While talking over a day so ordinary
As to seem miraculous.

—from Rattle #18, Winter 2002
Tribute to Teachers

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June 13, 2016

“Boomer” by George BilgerePosted by

George Bilgere

BOOMERS

Look, here’s a photograph, black and white,
of my parents at their favorite restaurant,
Ruggeri’s, on the Hill in St. Louis, and it’s
1956. My mother in a cocktail dress and pearls,
my father in his jacket and tie, what choice
did he or any man have in those days,
and on the table is, of course, an ashtray and drinks
and the remnants of maybe spaghetti pomodoro
and garlic bread and some of that good rigatoni.
 
And you’re thinking, okay, what’s the point? Because
you happen to have more or less exactly the same photo
of your mother and father out on the town one night,
only it was 1957 and the place was called Maury’s
in New York City and your mother was a blonde,
not a brunette, but the image has exactly the same, Hey,
we’re still here in the late fifties, enjoying our Manhattans
and dinner at our favorite place, we’re still young, not to mention
alive, we like Ike, the Yanks are in first place,
and no one’s even mentioned divorce yet kind of look
so popular in those days.

And my point here is, everyone has this photo tucked away
in a box in a bureau somewhere, and now and then
you need to take it out and look at it
earnestly and reflectively, because he’s coming
across the room right now, the photographer
with his big funny-looking old camera with the flash bulb,
and your wife is already smiling and hiding her cigarette,
you look up from your steak, it’s your turn
to be in the bureau.

—from Rattle #51, Spring 2016

__________

George Bilgere: “We graying baby boomers have something today’s millennials never will: a shoebox (or two, or three) of old black and white family photos. There’s mom and dad when they were young. There’s that almost forgotten trip to the Grand Canyon. And there’s a shot of a bunch of old people you can no longer identify. And among these relics of an ancient past are several shots of your parents having a fancy dinner somewhere. Back in the ’50s the nicer restaurants hired a photographer who would go table to table, asking if you wanted to memorialize your night out on the town. ‘Boomers’ takes a look back at this charming custom, now lost in the mists of time (and cell phone photography).” (web)

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November 10, 2015

“Ghostly Heron” by George BilgerePosted by

George Bilgere

GHOSTLY HERON

When I retire I plan to take up photography.
I will buy a very nice camera, a big tripod,
and a large, expensive, pro-style lens.
I will rise early and photograph nature. 

Were you to rise early and venture forth
you might see me there in the misty landscape,
pointing my pro-style lens at a heron
standing ghostly by the river bank.
Ghostly stalker in the morning mist!

And then, if things work out, my heron photograph,
along with two dozen others
very much like it, and accompanied 
by my three-paragraph artist’s statement,
will hang for a full month in Sherry’s Kountry Kitchen,
beautifully framed and available for only $250 apiece. 

And I will sit there anonymously every morning,
quietly fuming that certain patrons
would rather read their sports page or play with their phones
or focus all their attention on Sherry’s Hearty Man Scramble
than look at my ghostly misty heron.

So all of this, in the end,
will amount to nothing more
than just another way of feeling slighted
by a world too busy and self-absorbed
to recognize my gift, my contribution,
my secret beauty. 

Like the heron,
I will be ghostly and misty
and largely unnoticed. 
But nonetheless magnificent. 

—from Rattle #49, Fall 2015

__________

George Bilgere: “Every morning here in Cleveland Heights I walk down to my local cafe to read the paper and work on my poems. And every month the cafe features the work of a local photographer or painter. We’ve got a lot of rivers and lakes around Cleveland, and therefore an abundance of herons, and also an abundance of photographers who are irresistibly drawn to them. It has become a kind of joke to my friends and me, who always look forward to what we call the ‘Heron of the Month’ feature. Thus ‘Ghostly Heron.’” (web)

 

George Bilgere is the guest on Rattlecast #38! Click here to watch …

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