Sample Poems by Walter Bargen

To Keep Going

Far up the valley,
from deep in the willow thickets
along the creek, a birdcall
comes I don’t recognize.

Juan Ramon Jimenez wrote
that he would  go away.
and the birds will still be
there singing. He was right,

he went away, and some of us
still hear him in the branches
beside our houses
and far up cold creeks.

But there are those birds
that have left too. The last
dusky seaside sparrow died
in a cage behind beach dunes

in Florida, unable to call in a mate.
The shrike, the butcher-bird, Jackie
hangman, the strangler, all names
for feathers on the same bird,

a songbird that goes against the grain
and with hooked beak breaks necks
of mice and other birds and sometimes
hangs their limp bodies on strands

of barbed wire where they dangle
like half-eaten laundry, their song
disappearing too, along with
the meadowlark that has perched on

a fencepost in my garden and tilted its
head back, stretching its neck, exposing
a black feathered necklace as it points
its bill skyward, clearly announcing

spring, a yellow-breasted soloist
fronting an orchestra of greening
grass, it too is going away, and for
no good reason that we understand,

and so there are fewer notes
to remind us of his going.

Concessions

When my son wrestles
his cat into his arms,
the soft fur is
suddenly muscled

and clawing, as it struggles
to rescue its instinct. He
calls and is ignored,
can’t stop calling

as the fledging warbler, wings
outstretched, runs through
the tomatoes that are hard
and pale green. I’m

reminded of silent films
where men with wings
of paper and canvas
flapped their arms up

and down running across fields,
only to fall off the edge
of a boulder, a pier, some-
thing, anything, as if falling

and flying belonged in
the same breath. The cat
that knows nothing
else, I tell him to take

into the house, as it
lunges from his arms,
dives for the faint
frantic cheeping.  

What can I do but catch
the cat, catch the bird,
exile one to
the house, one to

a low persimmon branch,
as the parents cry from
somewhere in the thicket.
It’s a precarious perch

for something so young,
and before I leave
the tree, the cat is back,
the door left open.

I see a second fledgling
running down a garden
row, its half-naked wings
beating the cold spring air.

Explanation

A child captures a bumblebee,
shows his mother how it sits unperturbed

in his hand, a friend, but she grabs a glass jar
and traps it, screwing the lid on quickly, warning

him not to do it again. There’s the beginning
of an incessant rumor that grows louder until

he picks up the jar and bangs it on the ground,
breaking the bottom out, but the bee keeps

ramming the lid, and his mother takes it from
him, sticking the jagged end into the dirt.

Bumblebees, genus bombus, order hymenoptera,
live in complex colonies, have four membranous

wings, their abdomens attached by slender pedicels.
Hymen is the Greek god of marriage, a vaginal

fold, and lives in our collective love and lust.
This order of insects takes its name

from the fragile union of body parts, of nectar
and air, of diaphanous wings and hymneal

flights, of painful stings and fluttering light,
from boys tumbling through the world.

Kite

In a field shredding light,
his arms outthrust,
fearless, facing the full force,
his paper phoenix ripping skyward,
wind willed, unwillingly
veering left, right,
mad spinning and looping,
diving out of control,
then swooping up
just before the crushing impact.
The kite races higher,
hurdling clouds.

Anchored, grounded,
he feels the taut tension of away,
listens to the seething
unwinding whirl, the tenuous
string of distance playing out.
His fingers burn, trying
to slow the coming end,
hoping the knot will hold.
The spooling handle jerks from his hands,
and bounces across the field.
The kite off wide into the world,
catches on a branch,
before tearing free and apart.

That’s what they call them,
paper folded and folded again
until the piece almost disappears
into the lifelines of a palm.
Held so tight they could kill,
these messages passed
between inmates—
scribbled paper kites
sailing through steel bars.

Centenarian
                                     
The settling pastels, the walled horizons,
the yellowing nylon curtain pulled back,

unattached to clouds and rain, but the metal
rungs ringing over the guide bar above the bed

are a downpour. The weather
of his room stifling, the day unmoving,

the florescent lights an unsteady flicker. Morning
and evening a switch ruled by experts.

In his morphined daze he dies
and flies over Memphis.

No pyramidal shadows crossing the desert.
No obelisks pointing at sand-stormed skies.

No Blue Nile, no mastaba, just a muddy Mississippi  
and a convalescent Graceland.

No slave-driven barge,
but a procession of chauffeured pink Cadillacs.  

No thronged thousands mourning a sun god,
just a shaky sequined king.

No mummified hawks and crocodiles,
instead porcelain guitar salt and pepper shakers.

No immortal blue yonder.
No wild angelic wonder.

Just a rising cumulus of pain,
a thunderhead jolting every nerve

over Memphis, a pitch and roll
as rain cleanses the room.