William Trowbridge

September 29, 2015

“What Ever Happened to …?” by William TrowbridgePosted by

William Trowbridge

WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO …?

We read it in magazines, see it on TV:
former child star A was stabbed
to death in a crack deal, while B,
who used to play the sweet old nanny
on TV for 15 seasons, got nailed

for running call girls, and C, cleavaged
knockout in that surfer flick, turned
fifty-three and lives in a Tampax carton
underneath the Harbor Freeway,
not to mention D, the dude groupies

camped out in the snow to see,
who plans a sex change when they let him
out of Folsom. Now there’s E,
who murdered F and G when he found
them in a lovers’ knot at H’s Azores

getaway, which later burned
when H caught fire in a free-base fling
with I through Z. It cheers us up
to think the price tag on that Lear
was way too much for them, too,

that the ones still living have to dine
on crow sautéed in gall, that another
vacant seat at Plenty’s gala now awaits.
It could be ours, if we could dig up
the address and get there first.

—from Rattle #48, Summer 2015

__________

William Trowbridge: “One day while studying for my PhD comps, I came across a group of Howard Nemerov poems in the old Brinnin and Read anthology. I was bitten, seriously bitten, couldn’t stop going back to them—their music, their intelligence, their electrical charge. And then I wrote a poem. That afternoon, I was, to use a John Crowe Ransom word, ‘transmogrified’ from a budding scholar into a seedling poet. But I had neither the time nor the money to go through an MFA program. So, after graduation and in my ‘spare time’ from teaching, I continued my poetry-writing education in the college of monkey-see-monkey-do, happily learning from the poems of great, hand-picked tutors. I still attend.” (website)

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January 5, 2015

“Battleground” by William TrowbridgePosted by

William Trowbridge

BATTLEGROUND

It showed the War was as my father said:
boredom flanked by terror, a matter of keeping
low and not freezing. You wore your helmet

square, he said, not “at some stupid angle,
like that draft dodger Wayne,” who died
so photogenically in The Sands of Iwo Jima.

Those nights I heard shouts from the dark
of my parents’ room, he was back down
in his foxhole, barking orders, taking the fire

that followed him from France and Germany,
then slipped into the house, where it hunkered
in the rafters and thrived on ambush. We kept

our helmets on, my mother and I,
but there was no cover, and our helmets
always tilted. He’d lump us with the ones

he called “JohnDoes,” useless, lazy.
We needed to straighten up and fly right,
pick it up, chop chop, not get “nervous

in the service.” We’d duck down like G.I.s
where German snipers might be crouched
in haylofts, their breaths held for the clean shot.

“Bang,” my father said, “the dead went down,
some like dying swans, some like puppets
with their strings cut.” I wanted to hear more,

but he’d change the subject, talk about
the Pennant, the Cards’ shaky odds, how Musial
was worth the whole JohnDoe lot of them.

—from Rattle #44, Summer 2014

__________

William Trowbridge: “One day while studying for my PhD comps, I came across a group of Howard Nemerov poems in the old Brinnin and Read anthology. I was bitten, seriously bitten, couldn’t stop going back to them—their music, their intelligence, their electrical charge. And then I wrote a poem. That afternoon, I was, to use a John Crowe Ransom word, ‘transmogrified’ from a budding scholar into a seedling poet. But I had neither the time nor the money to go through an MFA program. So, after graduation and in my ‘spare time’ from teaching, I continued my poetry-writing education in the college of monkey-see-monkey-do, happily learning from the poems of great, hand-picked tutors. I still attend.” (website)

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January 15, 2014

“Dead End” by William TrowbridgePosted by

William Trowbridge

DEAD END

I’ve had it with movies where escapes go wrong,
like when the assistant V.P. at the bank,
who hates his job and has bought a ticket
to Rio—where there’s no extradition treaty
with the U.S.—is sneaking a million
smackers out of the vault one night when he

gets interrupted by the nosy cleaning lady
and has to cool it till she mops her way
upstairs, and then, after he finishes packing
the money into a big suitcase, he tries
to lug it inconspicuously to a cab that
hits every damn red light on the way

to the airport, where his flight’s been
cancelled because of weather, meaning
he may not get out of the country
before they discover his brazen theft,
which, with the cleaning lady’s help,
they may have already done, making

his life seem more and more like that dream
where you’re running from the monster
and aren’t really moving, but now
another flight’s arrived just in time, though
customs wants to talk to him about
the 150-pound suitcase, which he explains

contains cash his bank has to pay a Rio firm
before Monday to get a fat contract
and that the customs guy, who hates
his job, too, decides, after some questioning
and I.D. checking, not to investigate
further, so that finally the coast looks clear,

except the plane has a stopover in Houston,
where the poor slob has second thoughts
and flies back home to his caged-in life,
where he sneaks the money back into the vault
before Monday’s opening. Jesus, think of it:
that lousy double-crossing bastard. Rio!

—from Rattle #40, Summer 2013

__________

William Trowbridge: “I was born in Chicago and grew up in a middle-class neighborhood in west Omaha. When I was a kid, I used to spend hours in my room building model airplanes. I later discovered that the then incomparable pleasure I experienced during that activity had at least something to do with Testor’s Extra Fast Drying Model Airplane Glue. It was probably also what caused me to fall for Doris Day one afternoon as she sang ‘Secret Love’ on my Philco. Later yet, I found that writing poems gave me a pleasure similar to the one I got building models, but with the added feeling of strong attunement to what Richard Wilbur calls this ‘bric-a-brac world’ and without the secret love and glue fumes.” (web)

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