Why Matter Might Matter
The more I think about
the size of the universe
in relation to the size
of the earth in relation
to the size of each
of us, I have a hard
time thinking anything
can matter that consists
of such little matter.
And yet there is a woman
with green eyes who makes
me forget the long odds
with a certain look
and a certain smile
and can make me stop
thinking and start living
as if there is so much
that really does matter.
Here’s a link to a video of me and Aistis Žekevičius a poet and translator reading the poem at the Grand Finale of the Lithuanian Writer’s Festival in Vilnius, May 2022. The event was carried live on Lithuanian TV.
A link to The Great Escape on George Bilgere’s Poetry Town
Coming to Terms
My father’s constant commandment
focused on my hair, which he
had confused with some household pet.
Train the damn thing, if you keep
it combed, it will learn to stay
in place. I listened to this heartfelt
yet blindly given advice again and again.
For close to two decades I tried to keep
his law, Keep thine hair combed,
so it may learn to fall to the right.
But my hair had its own free will;
its sense of order had been replaced
with one of wanderlust. Not even Daniel
could have tamed my wild mane,
nor could Moses, even with both arms
raised, have managed to keep it parted.
With oils, creams, and sprays,
my father anointed my head,
but my bad hair life went on,
until I was old enough to leave home.
Middle age has brought me comfort
with my hair, a chaotic mess
that hints at a more natural order
of things. My hair still falls where it may,
but before I take it on the three day
drive to my father’s house, it mainly falls
on a barber shop floor. Some say
I have learned to use crew cuts
and ball caps to hide the truth,
but I prefer to see these simple acts
as humble sacrifices given in homage
to the most ancient of covenants.
0riginally appeared in the Windhover;
reprinted in The Comic Flaw.
Remembering the Body
I think I might convert, become a modern pagan.
The Baltic Perkonis, god of thunder, blesser
of sacred oaks, stern god of my ancestors,
holds a certain ethnic charm. But, I believe
if I stray, I would stagger into the sodden flock
of Bacchus. I could happily attend even biweekly
celebrations of his ecstatic and orgiastic rites.
Imagine a religion founded in the senses.
What sins could its believers commit?
Father, forgive me for I have remained
chaste and sober for too long. What guilt
could therapists dredge up from the psyches
of humans left alone to enjoy being human?
But when I search my local Yellow Pages
for Bacchean Temples, I am confronted
by an absence and forced to reconsider
my more sober faith. I recall how Christ
kept the party at Cana going. How he
commanded others to remember
his body, his blood—the Eucharistic
sacrifice. But what sacrifice could exist
if neither element was not, in some way, joyous?
Once graced with this glimmer of Christ
freed from Gnostic beliefs, I return
to give thanks for the creed
which states that Christ rose
to reign forever, his body restored—
a bright, blood-filled vessel—molded
in the image of the Creator, as are we.
originally appeared in The Penwood Review;
reprinted in Remembering the Body.
Good Enough
In every house of my Slavic Aunts
and Uncles, the same black and white icon
sat tucked in the gilded frames of copies
of the Last Supper or the Sacred Heart of Jesus,
in the corners of fading photos of Padre Pio
or Pope Paul—a mass card with a head shot
of the late Catholic president. Too young
in ‘63, I grew up with no memory of JFK
but I was certain that he was a modern saint
interred beneath an eternal flame.
But then like George and Christopher,
Saint John F’s beatification got torpedoed
by stories of his libido and conquests.
But I confess that as a teen, I was mightily
impressed by knowing that the FBI
had tapes of Marilyn and Jack on his bad back
making the bed springs sing—a profile
of endurance in deed, and I began
to cherish the tenet that gives each man
the chance to grab for the last rung of purgatory.
originally appeared in MO; reprinted in Remembering the Body; Kirk Lawrence’s reading of Good Enough
God’s Radio
In Religious Ed a nun once told us that we
should always make the sign of the cross
before and after we prayed. The first gesture
opened God’s wavelength, the second closed it off.
I wonder if the sister knew how many nights
I would lie in bed, panicked, wide awake
unable to remember if I had signaled
Roger and out. Odds or evens—heaven
or hell. I crossed myself without stopping,
hoping to land on evens or at least to interrupt
the feed before my memories of Linda Ursoni’s
blouse and her fully developed fifth grade breasts
bubbled forth from the back of my pubescent mind.
Even as an adult, I find myself playing
the same game, while hoping that someday
I might cross myself one last time and be done
with it, but the deep need to hide always follows–
in the name of the Father, and of the Son…
Originally appeared in The Christian Century;
reprinted in The Comic Flaw and
Druskininlai Poetic: Fall 2010 translated into Lithuanian
by Marius Burokas . A link to me reading the poem at DMC decades ago.
Temperance
Each year come Ash Wednesday
my father swore off the sauce—
cold turkey for forty days
and forty nights of self-willed
sobriety. Our family’s life
slid slowly off its hard edge.
Each night my parents watched
over my bedside Lenten prayers.
Finished, I’d climb into bed
and fall asleep counting
down the days until Jesus
would rise from the tomb,
and the bottle would descend
from the unlocked cupboard again.
Originally appeared in the Windover. Reprintedin Atlas Sighs
Angling with D.H. Lawrence
As an undergraduate I was first drawn to him
by the short introduction in our anthology
that described him as the son of a refined woman
and a lout, our shared biography in a nutshell.
The Junior Poet Project was the bane
of English majors at my Catholic school.
We were to pick one of Norton’s poets,
learn the poetry, the biography, the criticism
and then sit for an hour or more
to be grilled by a panel of PhD’s.
The good students in their need
to impress selected the expected,
Dickinson, Donne, Browning, Auden,
Yeats, Keats, Eliot, and Hopkins
of course. Poets the faculty knew well
and could recite by their iambic-beating hearts.
But there are advantages, be they but a few,
of being sired by a lout. My old man’s
greatest lesson came to mind: “Angles,
Son, the secret is to always find the angle.”
I figured my chances for success lay
in the areas of the faculty’s ignorance,
so I studied the ignored D. H. Lawrence,
his understated diction, his debt to Whitman,
his search for blood knowledge, wisdom
not gained but found, found at the moment
of climax. And it worked. I made one of two A’s,
made an A studying a pagan’s theory of sex
at a Catholic U—now how’s that for a ricochet?
But the biggest payoff came way down the road,
on a first date with a woman out of my league
but on the rebound. As we sat at the movies
watching the always prowling Captain Kirk
recite lines of poetry to his target—a perky
marine biologist, “They say the sea is cold,
but the sea contains the hottest blood of all.”
I leaned to my date’s ear and whispered,
“That’s from D.H. Lawrence’s ‘Whales Weep Not.’”
Seconds later the projected and impressed
biologist repeated what I had just whispered
for all to hear, and, for that one glorious moment,
the desired woman seated to my right, thought,
“I’ll be damned, kind of ugly but really smart!”
Even though I proved her theory wrong
a thousand times over, we remain long wed,
and I’m still grateful for the secrets of fire
taught by blood, so I offer this hymn of praise—
God bless David Herbert Lawrence, ricochets,
rebounds, and every angle well played.
Appeared in the Proceedings of the 25th Angelo State University Writers Conference in Honor of Elmer Kelton. Reading the poem at the Depot Poetry Series, Norman OK.
Lighten Up
You don’t have to be Atlas
to know this world is a heavy place.
If the meek be blessed, I ask
what of the belligerent, the alpha dogs
who bite and claw, stepping on others
all the way to what they see as success,
unburdened by pangs of conscience?
By adding to the burden, piling on,
they do nothing more than aid gravity’s
mindless force that crushes the life
out of all of us a bit quicker
than it would leave on its own.
No, I believe the real the trick, the only true
human accomplishment, is to make the world
a lighter place. Start small, pat a slouching back,
hand out a compliment, dry a tear, share a smile,
or a laugh, create some art, lift a soul,
if even it’s just your own, or better yet,
let your work reach a friend or two,
or go all out like the saints, open
your heart wide, feed the hungry,
cure the sick, visit the lonely,
befriend justice and reap
the blessings, listen
for the sigh
of Atlas.
Originally appeared on the Texas Poetry Assignment. It became the title poem of my collection Atlas Sighs: Selected and New Poems. I wrote because I began to doubt the efficacy of angry poetry and wanted to begin offering something else.
St. Peter’s Square 1979
College kids half drunk on cheap spumante.
we decided to stand at the barricades
for hours. As the crowd grew behind us
so did our plan. The new Polish Pope
was returning from Mexico and would pass
within earshot. We knew that he was known
to stop and bless or converse with pilgrims
who spoke his native tongue. The grandson
of Polish immigrants, the group looked to me,
but my vocabulary was bluer than the Pontiff’s
eyes. I feared my broken second-hand Polish
was more likely to land me in the bottom
of some secret and dank Vatican dungeon
than it was to gain us a Papal audience.
Plan B, we decided to consult our foreign language
pocket travel guide. Short of receiving the Paraclete’s
gift of tongues, phonetics became our only chance.
We leafed through the little Polish it offered, looking
for some phrase that even Americans could pronounce.
Happy with our choice, we practiced in unison
as if we were again pre-communicants chanting
the Baltimore Catechism until we had it right.
That night as the young Pope rode past
a few feet away, we shouted in our best Berlitz,
Where are you going with our baggage?
The passing years bent the Pope
in half and hid him behind a cold
plastic mask, but I still relive that night.
Often in a dream, I see his confused look
snap around to our direction, and I swear
I can hear him answer, Too far, my son, too far.
This might be the poem I’m best known for. It was originally in the Windhover and then anthologized in St Peter’s B List; it most recently appeared in my collection Atlas Sighs. A link to me reading the poem at DMC in 2007.
The Miracle of Young Love
I look at the photos of us snapped
by a friend in the parking lot
of his apartment taken the morning
we told the world that we decided to marry
within a month of our meeting. How young
we look now some forty years on,
although then in our mid-twenties
we felt so old, maybe even wise.
How excited and bedazzled by it all,
by each other we appear.
My smile so honest, so wide,
a constant from shot to shot.
I look so content, I hardly
recognize myself beaming
in my favorite collarless dress shirt,
and you so beautiful in jeans
and a lavender button-down
so resolute and assured in our decision
most of the world will find rash.
In one shot we are looking deep
into each other’s eyes, foreheads
together, our faces the epitome of joy,
and all that is meaningful in this world,
the miracle of a trillion circumstances
and accidents from the Big Bang forward
that brought us together, sensed, and celebrated.
Our love so nearly captured on film.
First appeared on the Texas Poetry Review.
The Builder of Better Angel Dance Floors
Home from college, one summer weekend
with not much to do, I went to a local bar
with my dad. When he left his stool to piss,
Goo Goo, Crazy Joe, and Lumpy, his co-workers
and union brothers, sidled over to educate me.
“Sport, your old man would kill us if he knew
we told you this, but you should know,
your father is the best damn welder in the local.
They say Al Berecka could weld the heads
of two pins together.” They all shook their heads
in agreement and skedaddled back to their stools
once the men’s room door swung open.
As he reclaimed his seat my dad asked,
“What was that about?” “Ah, nothing,”
I said as the other men nodded knowingly,
and I tried to hide any hint of admiration.
Just as someone asked, “So who’s buying
the next round?” and the bar settled back
to its proper business—washing down pride.
Originally appeared in the Concho River Review (nominated for a Pushcart) ; reprinted in A Living is not a Life: A Working Title.