Imperial

By George Bilgere

In Imperial, George Bilgere's sixth collection of poetry, he continues his exploration of the beauties, mysteries, and absurdities of being middle-aged and middle-class in mid-America. In poems that range from the Cold War anxieties of the 1950s to the perils and predicaments of an aging Boomer in a post-9/11 world, Bilgere's rueful humor and slippery syntax become a trapdoor that at any moment can plunge the reader into the abyss. In Bilgere's world a yo-yo morphs into an emblem for the atomic bomb. A spot of cancer flames into the Vietnam War. And the death of a baseball player reminds us, in this age of disbelief, of the importance—the necessity—of myth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Release date: Jan 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9780822979623

Book preview

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.

MUSIAL

My father once sold a Chevy

to Stan Musial, the story goes,

back in the fifties,

when the most coveted object

in the universe of third grade

was a Stan the Man baseball card.

No St. Louis honkytonk

or riverfront jazz club

could be more musical

than those three syllables

rising from the tongue of Jack Buck

in the dark mouths

of garages on our street,

where men like my father

stood in their shirt-sleeved exile,

cigarette in one hand, scotch

in the other, radio rising

and ebbing with the Cards.

If Jack Buck were to call

my father's drinking that summer,

he would have said

he was swinging for the bleachers.

He was on a torrid pace.

In any case, the dealership was failing,

the marriage a heap of ash.

And knowing my father, I doubt

if the story is true,

although I love to imagine

that big, hayseed smile

flashing in the showroom, the salesmen

and mechanics looking on

from their nosebleed seats at the edge

of history, as my dark-suited dad

handed the keys to the Man,

and for an instant each man there

knew himself a part of something

suddenly immense,

as when,

in the old myths, a bored god

dresses up like one of us, and falls

through a summer thunderhead

to shock us from our daydream drabness

with heaven's dazzle and razzmatazz.

YARD SALE

Someone is selling the Encyclopedia Britannica

in all its volumes,

which take up a whole card table.

It looks brand new, even though it must be sixty years old.

That's because it was only used a couple of times,

when the kids passed through fifth grade

and had to do reports on the Zambezi River

and Warren Harding.

Der Fuhrer was defunct.

The boys came home,

and everybody got the Encyclopedia Britannica,

which sat on the bookshelf

as they watched Gunsmoke

through a haze of Winstons.

Eventually

these people grew old

and were sent to a home

by the same children who once wrote

reports on Warren