Shopping Cart
    items

      ←

      January 14, 2022Call of the FoxGeorge Bilgere

      The summer we rented the cottage in the woods
      we would waken in the middle of the night
      to the mating call of the foxes,
       
      which sounds like one of my freshmen
      barfing up hot dogs and Wild Turkey
      after his first frat party, a sound
      that makes you want to puke yourself
      out of sympathy or sheer disgust
      with the whole situation,
       
      how the imperatives of desire
      drive us into the dark woods,
      sick with the incandescent
      loneliness of the flesh.
       
      However, after listening for a while,
      my wife remarked
      that it was actually kind of funny,
       
      as if nature, usually so careful
      about beauty, about getting it just right,
      had for once screwed up,
      and created something even
      Mary Oliver couldn’t get behind.
       
      And then we thought,
      well, since we’re up anyway,
      and there’s nothing else to do …
       
      Which is why my wife
      is my wife.

      from #74 – Winter 2021

      George Bilgere

      “We had a pretty lousy spring. A disaster of a spring. The season of new life became a time of strange and frightening death. But when summer finally arrived I felt it was time for a change. Maybe it’s a cliché, but I felt it was time for something life-affirming. And for me that’s always been poetry. Like pretty much everyone else my family and I stayed put this summer, and I spent the long weeks and months reading and writing. I realized once again that in difficult times poetry can sustain me. I read Neruda. I read Rilke. I read my dear friend who has passed away, Tony Hoagland. Dorianne Laux and Barbara Crooker. Set against the backdrop of the pandemic, the poems I read burned with a strange new life. Instead of the immensity of the tragedy dwarfing poetry, it infused it with a tremendous new vitality for me. It kept me going.”

      →

      Related