Central Air: Poems

By George Bilgere

With humor and compassion, George Bilgere continues his explorations of the human predicament. The settings of these poems range from Cleveland to Berlin, from childhood to old age. Bilgere’s subject, in the largest sense, is America, in all its craziness, its haunted past, its imperiled future. But what really centers this book is the English language itself, which these poems endeavor to renew, reinvent, and reinvigorate.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9780822988892

Book preview

PITT POETRY SERIES

CENTRAL AIR

GEORGE BILGERE

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260

Copyright © 2022, George Bilgere

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Printed on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-6689-0

ISBN 10: 0-8229-6689-1

Cover art: Amy Casey, See Through

Cover design: Joel W. Coggins

ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-8889-2 (electronic)

For Alex, my son,

and for Billy Collins, my friend

You, who are both a speck of dust drifting in silence out of the sky onto its brief, gauzy wing, and the passing fancy of that passing damselfly.

Laura Kasischke

What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Robert Hayden

Contents

I

Morning, Berlin

Polar Bear

Anna Karenina

No Problem

Chernobyl

Fourth of July

Last Night

Stolpersteine

The Scar

Vespa

Deferment

Summer Pass

Charles Atlas

Moxie

Touched

Because I Could Not Stop for Death

II

Central Air

Pill Bugs

Archaic Poet Looks at God

German

Hardware

How I Met Your Mother

Mystery of Jerky

Mr. Something

For the Slip ’N Slide

Surveilled

Garbage Disposal

Neighbor

Red Light, Blue Sky

Bee

III

Reichstag

Narwhal

My Last Poem about Breasts

Facetime in Covidtime

American Masters

Misasa Bridge

Call of the Fox

How Life Works

I Heard a Fly Buzz

Scooter Scourge

Extinctions

New Yorker

Mars

Notes for a Blues Song

The Barn

Wasserturm

Lullaby

Ripeness

Acknowledgments

I

Morning, Berlin

The best part of the day.

The woman with the Kleiderladen

is hanging the latest styles

on a rack by the sidewalk.

In this summer’s dresses, women

look like fields of star jasmine. Galaxies.

The pretty waitress at the café—she’s from

some dusty nightmare, some desert, but

got herself over here, Merkel let her in—she’s

putting flowers on the tables.

The man at the wine shop is having a tasting.

He’s putting out glasses on lacquered trays.

The mothers look great, they’re walking by

with their kids, holding hands, they do

realize, they do, that this enchantment

will pass, something dark awaits us,

an empty room, a TV set waiting, but . . .

The waitress, young, skin like butterscotch, asks

what are you writing? In her bad German.

I am exploring the mystery of the human condition,

I say, I always say, in my worse German. It is our ritual.

At a distance of roughly two thousand miles

(ten light years) from Kabul

she laughs.

Polar Bear

A father died heroically in some Alaskan park

trying to save his kids from a polar bear.

Long ago, when his mother gave birth

one afternoon in Barstow, California,

could anyone have prophesied,

as in an old myth, that the baby