October 18, 2018

Walter Bargen

LUNACY

for Robert Bly

Decades ago he cried,
“No more poems about the moon!”

Torn from its branch,
the moon waned for a couple of weeks.

Summer nights, a magnesium-bright
flare troubled his memory.

No wished-on, bottom-of-the-sky, dreamy coin.
No lover’s mercurial suffering.

For years, he drank fifths of hard light
wrapped in brown bags.

Empties crowded the closet.
He staggered moonstruck across the page.

He’s at it again, declaring the stars a loss.
Chicken Little, he’s down on his knees.

He watches the tides trapped in a sidewalk.
He watches sand make a jailbreak to another universe.

He follows a nervous column of ants
along a crack to the next moon.

from Rattle #20, Winter 2003

__________

Walter Bargen: “The unmatched pair of shoes next to my bed claim a glorious if not infamous lineage. The right shoe claims to belong to General Douglas MacArthur and keeps saying, ‘I shall return,’ as it fades away on dark shores. The left one was worn by Khrushchev and bangs on the worn oak floor, demanding attention. All night I lie awake dealing with international crises and Madonna still won’t speak to me.”

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February 16, 2017

Walter Bargen

SOUTHERN PERFECTION

On the map there’s a name
floating on blue.
He travels
to a small island, almost
too small to find.
The plane
plummets through a sea
of clouds. He has just left
his wife
though she says how can
he leave what’s not arrived.
He gives
up arguing and arrives at
his leaving. His first heat-
warped step
is into the glare of the white-
washed decay of colonial
mansions.
Soon he discovers
the ocean is an ever-opening
vowel that
becomes thick and hot
the longer he lies in
the sand.
It reminds him of
his wife, the sand radiating
an end-
less sigh of dismissal.
Farther down the beach
bathers
take off their skins.
The apartment he rents
echoes
the nightly neighborhood
gunshots and a tireless steel-drum
music.
Though it’s a stray, the cat
that already lives on
the porch
adopts him. Days later
he finds it dead on
the stoop.
Each evening for
a week there’s a tarantula
nailed through
its abdomen to
the door. He buys a car,
the side
mirror held on
with wire. The first night
parked in
an alley the head-
and taillights are smashed.
It is
a perfection, the breaking
of what’s broken.

from Rattle #16, Winter 2001

__________

Walter Bargen: “Robert Frost said, ‘We shall be known by the delicacy of where we stop short.’ Call it the art of pulling back, that’s what I’m trying to do with the endings to my poems; rather than the ‘big splash’ that drenches the reader, generate the delicate ripple that keeps nudging the reader along after they’ve dried out.” (webpage)

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June 17, 2015

John Samuel Tieman & Walter Bargen

HAIKU SEQUENCE

jst
wb
 

once my father drew
the face of the moon before
he got drunk and left

To point at the moon
Is to point the moon
Right here.

* *

I throw a raisin
to a mockingbird hungry
belly yellow eyes

This withered drop of sun
So dark at noon
And so tasty.

* *

a scrap of my past
an old postcard from somewhere
I forgot to stamp

Forty years found
In a postcard whose lake and trees
Rested between pages 26 and 27.

* *

a single snowflake
I do my best to save it
I melt anyway

It is an epaulet, a promotion,
A star to be shouldered
The general command of snow.

* *

in a parking lot
I spot an acorn falling
from nowhere at all

The pale blue flower
Grows in the crack
Ready to move concrete.

from Rattle #47, Spring 2015
Tribute to Japanese Forms

[download audio]

__________

John Samuel Tieman & Walter Bargen: “We met when we served on the Missouri Arts Council. A few years ago, through email we began to exchange these short poems, these poems and many more, a project that now is a book-length collection.” (website)

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May 4, 2011

Walter Bargen

MINOR GODS

Another roadside bomb, another suicide
bomber, another dozen blind-folded, hands-tiedbehind-
the-back bodies found half buried at the town
dump—it’s how a Saturday explodes until I turn off
the radio and look out the east window at a tabby
crouched in explosive morning light and acting strangely.

I hurry outside to rescue an eight-inch-long, pencil-thin,
ring-neck snake before it is playfully eviscerated.
A hundred yards into the woods, the palm heat
of cupped hands has pacified its coiled panic
and I scold it to be more careful before it calmly
slithers into a brush pile and into another ambush.

Balanced between two flood lights on the west wall,
phoebes again build a nest out of moss and spittle,
and I build a four-foot-high fence on the ground below them.
They quickly abandon their efforts as if not understanding
what I’m trying to keep out and keep in. Occasionally,
I see their bobbing drab-gray tails on a nearby branch.

I leave the fence standing. Of course, I blame
the cats without evidence of guilt. Weeks later,
the phoebes return, the same pair or different,
I don’t know, following seasons of failed attempts
on every wall of the house, including the black snake
that scaled ten feet of siding to eat the hatchlings.

From the kitchen window, I watch them fly back
and forth through the gauntlet of clawed hunger,
too early to know ends except this flying.
Either the gods are omnipotent and not good,
according to Epicurus, just look at this world, or they are
good and not omnipotent, look at these phoebes.

from Rattle #26, Winter 2006

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September 17, 2009

Walter Bargen

UNDER A BARE BULB

She whispers not this bed, chair, room,
the next room, porch.
Too familiar, predictable, the boredom unrelenting.
The outcome known before it’s expected,
thick as molasses and nothing sweet about it.
Cloying, yes, long before it reaches the jar’s lip.

She’s a growing leak in the kitchen, words running
until it’s a continuous stream.
The porcelain stained from the down pouring
of rust and vitriol. The month’s water bill
astronomical. The plumber never calls,
no one believes in a fixed cosmos.

This is not where she wants to be.
Yellow pages a temporary solution:
a costume shop for a change of life.
What will it take, she wonders,
to repair the first-size hole in the wall
above her head? What will it take
to move off the dime, leave the hole
for the wasps and mice?

She shouts that a dozen anthropod species
were just discovered in a cave in Indiana.
Why can’t she discover one quiet home?
Not here, but states away, mountains away,
plains away, that tease the horizons of afterglow.

from Rattle #23, Spring 2005

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