Two
poems from Bruce Berger's Snake Oil
followed
by a note on the author
Confession
My mother gone
eight years,
My father thirty-seven,
The attending physician too old
To find himself at risk:
Now it can be told.
A
man I still remember
Flipping onto his hands
And walking that way upstairs,
Spent the latter years
Of my growing up in chairs.
Gymnast,
acrobat,
Hellion who retired
And took a second wife
(My mom), golfer,
horseman,
Chainsmoker for life,
Sixty
when I was born,
Still riding an aquaplane
Around the lake on his head,
He spent the inglorious years
After the chairs in bed.
Self-taught,
declaiming Shakespeare,
Kipling and the old chestnuts,
His elocution took
off.
I listen for the echo
And only catch the cough.
Of
course he blamed the weather.
We traveled where he could breathe.
Bad
weather remained his fate.
A doctor made him quit.
Of course it was too
late.
He
squirted mist in his throat.
Every morning he hacked
Midnight out of his
lung.
He wheezed, gasped and offended
Strangers we landed among.
In
restaurants, in lobbies,
The clientele complained.
One of the minor hells,
Traveling for better weather,
Was getting kicked from hotels.
Dishonored,
oxygen-starved,
The head he used to stand on
Started to forget.
As
fully conscious creatures
We crossed and never met.
Dreamlike,
the wit of my childhood.
Then the repeated stories
Of which I retain a
store.
By the time I grew into patience
There was less to be patient for.
Then
I was off to college;
My mother, thirty years younger
Than he, a nurse
in jail;
My father, forever failing,
Failing, failing to fail.
Nights
when he gasped at nothing.
Calls to rouse the doctor
Out of bed to sustain
Lifeblood with a shot
Of oxygen straight to the vein,
Just
one, for more would kill,
Deliverance enough that Dad
Woke to hack next
day.
Fitful letters from Mom,
So little was there to say
Until
a sudden call,
Senior year, that my father
Was lost, and I flew back,
The combat with his lung
Resolved by a heart attack.
My
mother gone eight years,
My father thirty-seven,
The doctor now so old
He's surely gone as well:
Now it can be told.
Years
afterward, my mother
Needed to speak of something
Once and then no more,
But first I had to swear
To secrecy. I swore.
That
final breathless night
My mother, frantic, summoned
The doctor to inject
Air in my father's blood.
Now to no effect.
He
reached into his bag.
Exaggerating his motions,
Leaving nothing blurred,
He raised a second shot.
Neither breathed a word.
My
mother nodded faintly.
The ending came in peace.
The doctor knew the art
Of medicine and wrote
On the death certificate, heart.
But
think of your father's family
By his first wife, who hated
The thought
of me, and guess
What they just might now
Call me. Murderess.
I
wanted you to know
But what I said tonight
Must never be said aloud.
I said I understood
And, furthermore, was proud.
Now
she and those she feared
Are gone, or almost gone.
For reasons of my own
I want it known.
I want it known.
Transmigration
As kerosene
climbs through a wick
Or sap through oak by the slow
Fire of transpiration,
So moisture from the saltpan
Has scaled the flesh and feathers
Of this
long-fallen crow
And seeded it with crystals.
Alone with its blue shadow
As if on a shield of snow,
Half scavenger with a tough beak,
Now more
than half a vessel
That might have served Versailles,
It challenges the
sun
With a blistering salt eye,
Easy in the wisdom
That its fellows
are nothing at all,
Serene in its lucky fall,
Its dazzling transmigration
From bird to the stabler kingdom
Of the gem and mineral.
©
Bruce
Berger was born in Evanston, Illinois in 1938 and received a BA in English at
Yale University. He dropped out of graduate work at Berkeley to pursue his own
writing and has lived ever since in the American West and Mexico, except for three
years working as a nightclub pianist in Spain. His prose books on the intersections
of nature and culture in desert environments include The Telling Distance,
which won the Western States Book Award and the Colorado Book Award. His poems
have appeared in Poetry, Barron's, the Hudson Review and
numerous other publications and anthologies, and have been collected in Facing
the Music (Confluence Press, 1995). Further information about the author can
be found on his website, at www.bruceberger.net.
