The Good Kiss

George Bilgere

• Publisher: University of Akron Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781884836930
• eBook ISBN: 9781935603375
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

The Good Kiss is a collection of poems dealing loosely with the subjects of divorce, sexuality, and American culture from the 1950s to today. The poems vary in tone from the fairly serious to the reflective and meditative, to the wryly comic. Perhaps it is fair to say that this range of tones exists within many of the individual poems, and is their defining characteristic. Poems like "What I Want, " and "The Good Kiss" are good examples of these quirky, rather unexpected tonal shifts and blendings.

What I Want

for my marriage, 1996–2000

I want a good night’s sleep.

I want to get up without feeling

That to waken is to plunge through a trap door.

I want to ride my motorcycle

In late spring through the Elysian Fields

Of the Rocky Mountains

And lie once more with Cecelia

In the summer of 1985

On a blanket in the backyard of our house

In Denver and watch the clouds expand.

And it would be great to see my mother

Alive again, at the stove, frying a pan of noodles

Into that peculiar carbonized disk that has never been replicated.

I would like for my ex-wife to get leprosy,

Her beauty falling away in little chunks

To the disgust of everyone in the chic café

Where she exercises her gift

For doing absolutely nothing.

I want world peace.

I want to come home one evening

And find that Julia, the new assistant professor

In the history department,

Has let herself into my apartment

For the express purpose of lecturing me

On the history of lingerie.

I don’t ask for much: a good merlot.

An afternoon thunderstorm cooling off

The city as I sit listening to Ella

Sing “Spring is Here,” so the air goes lyrical

And perhaps a stray bolt of lightning

Strikes my ex-wife as she steps from her car,

Setting her on fire, to the unqualified delight

Of the friends she has come to visit,

Who are thoroughly sick of her self-aggrandizing stories.

I want to spark a bowl of Maui Wowie

And spend the entire afternoon in my dorm room

With Corrine Spellman, trying to remember

What we were talking about, wondering

Whether, in fact, we had had sex yet.

I’d like to sit at the little outdoor restaurant

By the lake in Forest Park, talking with my aunt

In the humid summer twilight, as the hot

St. Louis day expires upon the water

And the moth-eaten Chinese lanterns

Glow like faded Kodachrome.

We would argue about the great tenor voices

Of the century, or causes for the dearth

Of poetry about the Gulf War,

Or why my father drank himself into an elegy

We never stop revising,

While couples on their paddleboats come in

From the darkening lake, as they’ve done

Since the beginning of time, and children

Call each other across the shadowy fields.

Yes, that would be nice.

I want a good woman

With a sweet bosom

And a wicked sense of humor.

I want to wake up in London on a spring morning

And read in the paper that my ex-wife

Has received a lethal injection, courtesy of the state

Of Ohio, as part of a citywide program aimed

At improving the civic pride of Cleveland,

But something went terribly wrong

And she’s been left in a persistent

Vegetative state

Which everyone agrees

Is nonetheless an improvement.

And it would be wonderful

To sit down with Maria

At our favorite restaurant in Madrid

With some good red wine

And listen to her Spanish

Caress the evening.

I want to read that a new manuscript

Of poetry by James Wright

Has been discovered in someone’s attic,

And someone I haven’t yet met,

In some future I have yet to despoil,

Has bought it for my birthday,

And after the kids are asleep

We sit out in the backyard,

A little drunk, and read it

Aloud to each other,

Something we often do

In summer, before climbing upstairs to the bedroom

In the big old house we love so much.

Anywhere

The boy’s been on the computer all morning

Playing virtual baseball, July

Sliding by in a huge yellow silence

Beyond the window as he clicks the keyboard

To send the phantom players running

The base paths under a virtual sky

In a nameless city’s digital summer.

Naturally, I brood about this as I work

In the garage at fixing his bike’s

Out-of-whack derailleur. In my day,

I find myself starting to say, before

My father’s fossil phrase

Catches in my craw—

Better to speak with this tool in my hand,

This old-fashioned screwdriver,

Its Phillips head buried in the steel

Crux of the material world, the torque

Flowing from my old-fashioned wrist

So chain will rise from sprocket, and power

From a boy’s legs will carry him fro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Like Riding a Bicycle
• Corned Beef and Cabbage
• Crusoe
• Jennifer
• Great Cathedrals
• What I Want
• Anywhere
• Magellan
• Tamed
• Eden
• Westward Ho
• St. Paul’s
• Elegy for the LP
• Let Down
• Night Flight
• Stupid
• The Garage
• Nectarines
• Threepenny Opera
• Denver
• Pain
• Wind Turbines
• The Good Kiss
• Blues for Cleveland
• Laundry
• Inherit the Wind
• Ike
• Mockingbird
• August
• Nevada
• Mysterious Island
• Old Man River
• Divorce
• Retrospective
• Cordell
• Annulment