Nine

I am standing by the pop machine
at the gas station, drinking a root beer.
It cost a dime, my whole allowance.
My bike—a J.C. Higgins three-speed—
looks cool. I just washed it
and waxed the blue fenders. 
Grown-ups are moving around me
in kind of a fog. Actually I feel sorry
for grown-ups, with their neckties,
their dark jackets and serious talk.
I am wearing low-top Keds. 
Their shoes are hard and gigantic. 
Try climbing a tree in those shoes.
How am I supposed to know
that an old, white-haired guy,
a grown-up, is watching me
from his desk in the future,
writing down every move I make.
Why would somebody even do that?
If there’s one thing I don’t like
it's writing. Writing and division. 
This root beer is actually excellent.
It's a hot day. My fenders are waxed.

The Forge

I remember seeing my father stop
halfway up the driveway because my tricycle
was blocking the way to the garage
and how he solved the problem
by picking up the tricycle by the handlebars
and smashing it through the windshield
of our brand new family station wagon,
his face red with scotch, his black tie
and jacket flapping with effort, the tricycle
making its way a little farther with each blow
into the roomy interior of the latest model
as the safety glass relented, the tricycle
and the windshield both praiseworthy
in their toughness, the struggle between them
somehow making perfect sense
in midday on our quiet suburban street,
the windshield the anvil, the trike the hammer,
the marriage the forge, and failure
glowing in the heat, beaten
and tempered, slowly taking shape.

The Scar

My son slipped on the ladder
to the pool and smacked his head.
Blood cauling on his small shoulders.
The doctor stitching him whole.

Three years on, after a haircut, 
the scar still rises, a quarter moon
a woman will ask about
as they lie there one night,

her fingers in his hair, 
her voice in his ear, the secret 
delight of him—a bit
like burnt toast—in her nostrils
as she takes his strangeness

into her. What she won’t know
is how the frail, Phidian skull 
I held that day in my hands
resounded on the hot concrete. 

It echoed all summer, less
like an egg cracking in a bowl,
or a world breaking, than the wild
beating of love against my heart. 

Dear girl who will one day win him, 
that part of the boy is mine.

Anna Karenina

My mother was long dead before
I was old enough to ask her
who she was. But I’m reading
Anna Karenina, which I recall
her burning through late nights
after a double shift, after
the insertion of suppositories
and the emptying of bedpans, after
she fried us up some pork chops
and opened a can of applesauce
and a can of hominy, and a can
of fruit cocktail. She’d sit down
with her cigarettes and red wine
and read these big novels
that took her away from thinking
all day about money and into
whatever Emma Bovary or
Elinor Dashwood was dealing with.
She disappeared into French
winters, she walked down
London streets or sat quietly
with Anna in her parlor.
I look around in the novel
for her cigarettes tonight,
her glass of wine. Anything
she might have left behind.

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.

Scorcher

In the summer twilight,
a couple of hours after dinner,
we like to take a walk.
The birds have turned in.
The air has finally cooled,
but the crickets and katydids
are getting so worked up
that the lightning bugs catch fire
a few feet above the lawn,
just where we left them
when we were kids.

Now and then
we pass another couple
from one of the green, old,
more or less identical 
streets of our neighborhood
as they move through the atmosphere,
mystical and obscure,
their voices softly registering
the news of the summer.

Good evening, 
we say to each other. 
Lovely night, isn’t it.
What a scorcher, we say
with gratitude and affection
for this shared mystery
of being human
on this dark little planet, 
on one of the slender,
gracefully swirling arms
of one of the smaller galaxies.

© George Bilgere, all rights reserved