Lately, I've been tuning into KEWU, the jazz station at Eastern Washington University.
1. Let's face it. Since I retired as an English instructor and until Bill Davie started reading poems during his Tuesday evening concerts and until I started watching the Billy Collins broadcast last month, I'd allowed many poets and their work to slip out of my mind. Today, after he read his own short unpublished poem, "Beauty" and read a few epigrammatic morsels from Don Paterson's The Book of Shadows, Billy Collins read two poems by George Bilgere's collection The Blood Pages.
When I taught poetry, it discouraged me when students talked about deciphering poems, as if their task were to translate poems out of a coded, secret language into everyday speech. I also chuckled to myself when students said this, imagining students ordering decoder rings (could those be ordered from the back of breakfast cereal boxes?) and using them to understand the readings I assigned.
So, I did my level best to assign poets like Mary Oliver, Naomi Shahib Nye, Ai, James Wright, Billy Collins and many others whom I considered accessible poets, poets who did not, to paraphrase Alice McDermott, leave anyone behind.
Today, Billy Collins read two poems by George Bilgere, whose work had slipped my mind, even though he writes an epitome of the kind of accessible poetry I most enjoy, often exploring life's common details and often reflecting back on a childhood of tricycles, pancakes, brokenness, and the fierce devotion of a single mother raising two daughters and a son on her own.
If you'd like to read my favorite George Bilgere poem, scroll down past Stu's limerick and you'll find "The Table".
Today Billy Collins introduced me to a couple of superb George Bilgere poems, "The Forge" and "Pancake Dilemma".
He ended the broadcast with two of his own poems, "The End of the World" and "The Dead". He signed off as we listened to a cut from Dexter Gordon and his office lights dimmed. This closing piece was a perfect complement to the Coleman Hawkins version of "Body and Soul" that Billy Collins played as the broadcast opened, as he popped into view and took his seat behind his version of the resolute desk.
2. Every once in a while, Debbie and I have to snap out of the easy relaxation that comes with sticking close to home, being entertained by Gibbs, and reading, working puzzles, and keeping in touch with friends and family one way or another and we must talk about the future, what the next few months might look like. I'm not ready to go public with our discussion, but if the next few months seemed at all kind of foggy to me, today some light broke through and I have a better sense of what the fall will look like around the old homestead here in Kellogg. It's all good.
3. Debbie and I watched some news programming this evening. Afterward, sensing a need to lighten things up a bit, I asked Debbie if she might like some popcorn. Her response was an enthusiastic "YES" and suddenly Debbie was more animated and full of vigor than she'd been all day. I popped us each a bowl. As we ate our last kernels, Debbie wondered if we had any ice cream left. I laughed. "Of course!" Debbie continued, "Maybe someone could make one of those drinks . . . " This could only mean one thing: an ice cream Brandy Alexander to cap off our night. I sprang into action, made us each a drink, and we ended the evening feeling a little euphoric and a lot contented.
Here's a limerick by Stu:
They're up there, some evidence shows.
Must be faster than light I suppose.
Come from behind the wild blue.
Seen by more than a few.
Simply known as those pesky UFO's!
The Table
I'm helping my brother-in-law
Knock apart an old table
By the tool shed, a table they've loaded
With planting pots and fertilizer bags
For years, until a decade outside
In wind and rain has done it in,
And suddenly, as in a myth
Or fairytale when the son
Recognizes his lost father under the rags
Of an old beggar, I realize
It's the kitchen table of our childhood,
Where my mother and my two sisters and I
Regathered and regrouped inside
A new house in a new state
After the divorce, where at the end
Of every day
We talked about our day,
Practicing our first fictions
Over pork chops and mashed potatoes
When mom had a job, or fish sticks
Or fried Spam, or chicken pot pies
When she didn't.
Where we dyed
Our Easter eggs, and played through
Rainy days of Scrabble.
Where I sweated over algebra
And German verbs, and our mother
Would drink a bottle of wine
And lay her head down and weep
Over everything, terrifying us
Into fits of good behavior,
Of cleaning and vacuuming, until
She snapped out of it,
As if nothing had happened
And made it up to us
By doing something crazy,
Like making pancakes for supper.
The table where my uncle
Got me drunk for the first time
And where I sat down for dinner
For the last time with my grandmother.
The table where my sister
Announced she was pregnant.
Where I said that, on the whole, Canada
Looked a lot better than Vietnam.
Where the four of us warmed ourselves
At the fire of family talk.
Plain brown table of a thousand meals.
I'm starting to sweat now, the hammer
Overmatched by iron-grained walnut
Bolted at the joists. It takes a wrench
And crowbar to finally break it down
To a splintered skeleton, to the wreckage
Of an old table, built
When things were meant to last,
Like a hardcover book, or a cathedral,
Or a family. We stack up what's left
For firewood, and call it a day.
George Bilgere
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