The Good Kiss

by George Bilgere

  I continue watching the breakers

  Stagger to their knees, and listen

  To the gulls work through

  Their chronic desolation,

  Thinking, for some reason,

  Of my mother, struggling

  Into the cross-stitched straitjacket

  Of her girdle

  Before a night out with my father,

  And I think of the boundless

  Surge and heave of the oceans,

  Swollen and unfettered

  Before any man, crazed

  By indifferent beauty, raised

  White sails to cup

  The wind’s breasts

  And girdle the globe.

  Tamed

  This summer my nephew

  Is old enough for his first job:

  Mowing the lawn.

  I watch him lean his skinny chest

  To the bar of the pushmower,

  Put his weight into it, and become,

  For the first time, a beast in harness,

  A laborer on the face of the earth,

  Somehow withering and expanding at the same time

  Into something worn and ancient, but still

  A kid withal, and I remember

  How bitterly I went into the traces,

  Hating that Saturday ritual,

  For a while, then growing inexplicably

  Into it, gradually mastering

  The topography of the yard,

  Sometimes using the back and forth technique,

  Sometimes going for the checkerboard effect,

  Or my favorite, the ever-diminishing square

  That left, at the lawn’s center, one

  Last uncut stand of grass, a wild fortress

  I annihilated with a strange thrill,

  Then stood back to take a look—

  To survey the field. To cast

  A critical eye on my work.

  Just as this kid is doing, standing

  At the edge of the mowed clearance.

  Taking his own measure. And liking it.

  Eden

  When Sarah and Jill, after a few years

  Together, decided Sarah should become a man,

  They thought about it for a long time,

  Staring at Sarah’s breasts in the candlelight

  As they hung dejectedly

  Like a pair of old dogs

  Someone decided to put to sleep.

  And they looked between her legs

  At that wild gate that was like the first sentence

  Of a story they had grown tired of telling.

  They seemed to hear a kind of music

  Under the surface of her skin, a far-off joy—

  And years later, after the hormones and the stitches,

  The lopping and relocating,

  I met a slim, serious young guy

  Who had been Sarah

  At a cocktail party in Monterey,

  And we shook hands and had a couple of beers

  While I smiled and tried very hard not to feel

  As if a woman had slit open the sack

  Of my scrotum and crawled inside,

  Confidently palming my testicles in her strong hands,

  Saying, There will be no more

  Secrets around here.

  Westward Ho

  I drive up and down the same five- or six-mile stretch

  Of coastline north of Santa Cruz, the sun

  Just about to touch down

  On the heads of surfers waiting for a last good ride.

  Johnny Cash is on the tape deck

  For no particular reason, but the songs seem

  To bend and straighten with the road,

  Their rhythm following the coast’s.

  I love this, the way the car and the music

  Go together with the way the road

  And the ocean go together, joining

  In this strange pleasure, this thing called

  Cruising, this lovely way of wasting time

  That only humans of the twentieth century

  Could know, and I think of the wagonmasters

  Leading their convoys of Conestogas

  Over Kansas and Wyoming and Nevada,

  Feeling the thrill and the dread

  Of the oceanic emptiness full of savages,

  The ice-locked mountain ranges

  Where some of them would famously

  Eat each other, and beyond it all

  The green promise of the Pacific,

  A glitter in the mind that kept them moving

  Across that vastness into John Ford westerns

  Unreeling through the insomniac hours.

  They couldn’t have imagined

  This drive up and down the coast, their long

  Westward haul detoured, stymied, turned inward

  Into a daydream, a sad love song, rising

  Like an elegy for all ended journeys

  Above the postcard bay and beyond

  The windshield, the ocean flashing on my left

  While in the houses on my right

  The TVs are flickering into prime time,

  And married couples, becalmed at the end

  Of the day, of the wild journey

  That got them here, sit down

  In front of their screens.

  St. Paul’s

  Dwells with me still mine irksome memory

  Which, both to keepe, and lose, grieves equally.

  —John Donne

  Sitting at St. Paul’s,

  Listening to the word of God,

  I try to imagine what it would be like

  To hear John Donne up there,

  Cleaning up his act to a packed house,

  Listing the pros and cons of this world,

  Weighing the odds against entering the next—

  And my mind drifts back to a summer evening

  At Fairmont Lake, parked by the shore with someone

  Named Barbara, watching the lights

  Of the little electric boats, red and green,

  My arm around her shoulders

  As couples navigated the dark waters.

  Sitting on my stone-cold pew

  Like an errant thought

  In the mind of Christopher Wren, I realize

  That I would rather be back there

  In the front seat of my mother’s bargelike Bonneville

  With Barbara, weighing the odds against

  Unbuttoning her blouse—

  And knowing what I know

  Of John Donne, I’m guessing

  He’d rather be there, too, mystified

  By the green-eyed radio and Sam Cooke

  Doing “Saturday Night,” but entranced

  By Barbara and the plush velour bench seat,

  The glassed-in room, cozy as a sonnet

  He’d write about our failure to be serious

  At growing old; time, he would argue,

  Will drag us presently from the warm car

  And Barbara and the boat-lit summer

  And into the cold cathedral,

  So for God’s sake hold your tongue

  And let me love.

  Elegy for the LP

  There, in the twilight,

  A long-necked bird

  Lowers its head

  And dark beak

  To drink

  So deeply

  From the flowing river.

  When at last it looks up

  To see me watching,

  Saddened and amazed,

  The woods grow silent again.

  For a long time,

  We both sit very still.

  Let Down

  We’re sitting on the deck at the day’s end,

  Drinks melting into the redwood table,

  The fresh green lawn lapping at our feet.

  This early dusk has all the ease

  Of a tense muscle letting go, of the unexpected,

  Delicious release I sometimes feel, deep down,


  When I pass a beautiful woman.

  The day is letting its pent-up kindness

  Descend upon me, upon my sister and her husband

  Whose marriage sails on imperturbably

  Through the mild squall they’re having

  Just now over the small and beautiful

  Problem of when to sell the stock options.

  My own marriage has foundered, gone down

  Somewhere beyond the green gulf of lawn. Her chair

  From past summers when we sat here

  Sits alone, in dry dock, over by the fence,

  Disgraced somehow, as if it had let us down,

  As if it had failed to deliver her,

  With her unexpected laughter

  And torrent of black hair

  She used to let down on me

  With a smile, when the day had let down

  Its darkness, and I think of how

  A nursing woman lets down her milk,

  Something a man cannot imagine

  But tries to imagine, and how

  I let her down gently, but so often

  That finally she let me down hard,

  Leaving only three chairs drawn together

  Against the night. And now Niel goes in

  To file a late report, and Merry

  Goes in to read aloud to her boys.

  I sit out for another hour

  In her chair.

  Night Flight

  I am doing laps at night, alone

  In the indoor pool. Outside

  It is snowing, but I am warm

  And weightless, suspended and out

  Of time like a fly in amber.

  She is thousands of miles

  From here, and miles above me,

  Ghosting the stratosphere,

  Heading from New York to London.

  Though it is late, even

  At that height, I know her light

  Is on, her window a square

  Of gold as she reads mysteries

  Above the Atlantic. I watch

  The line of black tile on the pool’s

  Floor, leading me down the lane.

  If she looks down by moonlight,

  Under a clear sky, she will see

  Black water. She will see me

  Swimming distantly, moving far

  From shore, suspended with her

  In flight through the wide gulf

  As we swim toward land together.

  Stupid

  We were so fucked up,

  She says to her friend, laughing.

  We were so fucked up, it was. . . .

  It was like. . . .

  And her friend says, Yeah,

  We totally were,

  And I wonder

  What it would be like

  To be permanently stupid,

  To go through life

  At that altitude, just clearing

  The lowest rooftops and TV aerials,

  Heading for the mountains. . . .

  My friends and I used to try it,

  Sitting around a Day-Glo bong, brains

  Turned to low, then lower,

  So unmoored and adrift,

  So hopelessly out of range

  Of our calls to the lost

  Vessels of each other,

  We could only giggle, wondering,

  Even as we did so,

  Why.

  Now and then,

  The crippled sub of an idea

  Would try to surface out there

  On the stoned moment’s

  Glassy horizon

  Where the strawberry-scented candle

  Burned like. . . .

  Like. . . .

  The Garage

  On these summer nights, I play

  Ping-Pong with my brother-in-law,

  A couple of beers sweating

  On the tool shelf, the Giants game

  Coming in loud and clear

  On the paint-spattered shop radio,

  And tonight I’m working very seriously

  On my troublesome forehand,

  Giving more concentration than usual

  To the problem of topspin.

  Today a woman on our street,

  Running late for work, backed up

  Her SUV and rolled over

  Her three-year-old son. All day,

  I’ve thought of her as she goes

  Through the hours, living in that remote,

  Astonishing place she has discovered,

  Someplace wholly new

  Where few of us have ever ventured,

  And as I trot down the driveway

  To retrieve an errant smash,

  I realize that the sheer speed and pressure

  Of her passage out of the world

  I’m living in tonight, and into the blazing

  Spaces where she is traveling

  Far beyond me, like the blue fleck

  Of a satellite, utterly alone,

  Is what makes the lighted mouth

  Of the garage, with its beer and ball game,

  Its smell of oil and gas, its cardboard boxes

  Of family history, seem like a sweet

  Refuge, a cave I return to gratefully,

  Holding the white moon of the ball—

  A fragile, weightless thing.

  Nectarines

  The gay man standing next to me

  At the organic food store

  Is squeezing the nectarines

  With the same concentration

  I would give a woman’s breasts,

  Or he would give,

  Or might give—I don’t really know—

  The weight between his lover’s legs.

  He is trim, fortyish, wearing a pair

  Of vaguely European loafers

  And the kind of perfect haircut

  No stylist has ever felt I deserved.

  His slacks and T-shirt exist at a point

  On the spectrum of casual elegance

  Just beyond my ability to actually detect it

  But which nonetheless makes me feel,

  In my jeans and JC Penney’s sports shirt,

  Like a shambling, half-trained circus bear.

  When standing next to a woman

  In a supermarket, I sometimes feel

  As if we were back in the Garden,

  A realm of fertile ferment

  Where we walk in a kind of heady sexual buzz

  Among the ripe fruits and frozen dinners of the world,

  Temptation everywhere

  As we scan the zebra codes

  Of our deliciously

  Unfamiliar flesh.

  And when I pass a straight guy

  In the aisles, we nod, or raise an eyebrow

  To acknowledge our place

  In the hairy fellowship of predators.

  But when this man and I

  Look briefly into the Sanskrit, the blank

  Scrabble tiles of each other’s eyes,

  We smile briefly and go back

  To thinking, quite seriously,

  Of nectarines.

  Threepenny Opera

  The elderly modern dance instructor

  And his elderly wife are dancing

  In top hats and tails, doing a Kurt Weill

  Number as old as their marriage.

  They’ve reached that age when the body

  Is starting to wonder how it got here,

  When it has become strange, even to itself,

  And moves around uncertainly

  As if looking for a lost pair of glasses.

  They do not mean for what they’re doing

  To be a parody, but, of course, it is;

  The word means something like

  “To sing alongside,” and it’s just

  Possible to see the lithe dark lovers

  They used to be, singing just beyond

  The penumbra of the spotlight.

  When they tap dance and set

  Their old skeletons c
lattering

  Across the stage, the teenage boy

  In front of me smiles and nudges his girlfriend

  Who has reached the moment

  Of her beauty that will keep everyone

  On the edge of their seats

  For the next two or three years.

  Denver

  In that frayed summer hat,

  She’d pick the strawberries

  From our little backyard plot

  While the bone-white wave

  Of the Rockies

  Rose in the background

  And broke without a sound.

  I’d get the ice and rum

  And drop it all together

  Into our unpredictable blender.

  Now for the bony crunch and hum

  Of the blades cutting through

  To clearer water.

  We sat at the kitchen table

  Until our tongues grew numb

  With stories that grew ever truer:

  Stories of our fathers and mothers.

  Elegies for past lovers.

  Pencil sketches of things to come.

  And our time-proof laughter.

  With the last of the daiquiris,

  We sat out on the porch stoop

  To watch the Rockies

  And each other

  Disappear.

  Pain

  Animals in the wild are perfect and know nothing

  About pain. Also perfect

  Is an Olympic sprinter pulling off

  His jersey after a race; the body, flexing

  For TV, blinds you; Oh, you say,

  That’s what it’s supposed to look like.

  But all wild animals are like this because they live

  In a perpetual Olympics. There’s no

  Margin for error out there,

  And any ragged flock of gulls

  Surfing a wind current, any rag

  Of a jackrabbit poised by the roadside

  Dwells in the lean, perfected moment; one

  Busted bone, one gray hair, one

  Moment’s inattention, and he’s a goner,

  Crunched in the maw of a larger, wilder

  Perfection. That’s why

  They’re wild: pain

  Never has a chance to teach them

  A thing. The parakeet in his cage

  Of pain, the ferret on his sexy chain,

  Nosing the nipple ring

  Of a tattooed punker, the cocker

  Spaniel tied by the neck

  To the railing outside Starbuck’s, waiting

  For the slim blonde in the pale

  Translucent blouse to finish her latte

  With a pale unshaven man she’s enjoying

  Breaking up with—they’re not wild