George Bilgere: Palimpsest

We’re bicycling through the Tiergarten
on a summer morning in Berlin,
my wife and I, our son in his bike seat,
and it really is a lovely day, except
someone has spray painted in red,
dripping cursive on the marble pedestals
of the statues of the great poets
and composers scattered around the park,
Juden Raus, Jews Out, and my first thought
is, hey, my German is getting better,
I figured that out right away,
even though the handwriting is poor,
but of course the author was working
in the dark, and under a certain pressure,
so really, you can’t blame him, and besides,
the quality of the handwriting isn’t
the point here, nor is my progress
in German, which in most respects
has been disappointing. The point
is that we have a bottle of wine
and some ham and cheese sandwiches
and we’re going to make the best of it,
we’re going to spread the blanket
and have a picnic here in the not entirely
new Germany, that bad last century
still bleeding into this one, blood
still soaking the feet of the poets,
while our little boy, new to history,
runs laughing under a blazing sun
through the green illiterate meadows.

(In textual studies, a palimpsest is a manuscript page, either from a scroll or a book, from which the text has been scraped or washed off in preparation for reuse in the form of another document.)

George Bilgere: Abandoned Bicycle

A bicycle—a nice one—
has been locked to the lamp post
all summer and fall.

Tires gone flat.
A congregation of leaves
worshipping the wheels.

And on the brake levers
and the tiny bolts
that held the seat exactly
where someone wanted it to be,
rust is constructing
its sprawling embassies.

Maybe a drunk drifted
over yellow lines. A clot
formed in the thigh
and moved north.
Or somebody just got
sick and tired.

Anyway, the bike is waiting.
Its metals gleam urgently.

Soon the scavengers will come.
The pedals—unable to live
without each other—will vanish
into a fresh new marriage.

The seat will disappear
into a seat-shaped abyss.

One night, someone
will help himself to a wheel.
Not quite a bicycle,
but a start.

And the bike,
like an abandoned person,
will become a clock,
calibrated to measure
the precise duration
of loneliness.

George Bilgere: Pancake Dilemma

Another subway station blows up in Europe,
it’s right there on the front page,
and I’m about to pour some syrup on my pancakes.

But perhaps I shouldn’t be doing this.
Maybe I should just put the syrup down
out of respect for the victims and their families.

Yet who is there to witness my sacrifice,
my gesture of solidarity, however small,
with the international community?

My wife is playing with our son in the living room.
I’m at the table by myself, and I could just go ahead
and pour the syrup and smear on some butter
and think compassionately about the victims
while eating the pancakes while they’re hot.
No one will benefit from my eating cold pancakes.

Instead, I call out to my wife from the dining room,
“Another subway station blew up in Europe,
they think it’s terrorists,” but she doesn’t hear me,
the TV’s turned up for Paw Patrol.

So I just sit here quietly for a moment,
then start eating the pancakes,
trying not to enjoy them too much.