Two
poems from Bruce Berger's Snake Oil
followed
by a note on the author
Make
It New
One
century after Frederick Jackson Turner
Dismantled our frontier, a balding man
Across
the aisle on a coast-to-coast flight
Pulled some papers from his calfskin briefcase,
Scanned
them in the laser of his seatlight,
Ripped them in half, then in quarters,
and stuffed
Them into a plastic bag. When I returned
To my magazine, he
promptly fetched some more,
Held them to the beam and calmly tore,
Dismissing
the cart of drinks. Over the Catskills,
Lake Erie, the Mississippi, steadily
Westering,
he shed a fine thin scrawl
That documented, I decided, life
Up to here,
arid jobs and botched relations,
Marriages and most of all the kids
Who
dropped him first and whom he now dismembered
And crammed into the plastic
oubliette
He would let fall forever into the first
Receptacle on deplaning.
Setting back
His watch and striding toward ground transportation
With a
lightened carry-on, he would assume
More challenging positions, unentangling
Alliances
and roads not previously
Taken, meanwhile pledging to resist
Atlantic urges
to turn present joys
Into the tonnage of the written past
Except, perhaps,
to let some foster self
Dash off, quixotically, the truly new
On onionskin
in calligraphic haiku
To slip between the dense and still inflating
Volumes
of our other coastal shelf.
Omniscient Eye
A man gazing over my shoulder
As they lowered my Omaha aunt
Said, at the
ceremonial
Coffee that followed, I see
You're starting to lose your hair.
I
ran cold. Whose funeral
Was this supposed to be?
My aunt lost her lament.
The
unkindness of that stranger
Kindled a mortal terror.
I
stared straight in the mirror.
The rondure of a tousled
Forehead contrived
to block
The telltale fontanelle.
Small sweat to dismiss a matter
So
tucked away it took
Two mirrors to reveal.
But then the haircutter,
Weapon
in hand, would spin
My chair around and hold
His oval out to display
The
overlay of fuzz,
The underlay of skin,
The monitory sign.
Was the haircut
OK?
Of course it never was,
Despite my quick It's fine
Now
that mortal terror
Spies on itself nonstop,
What need of the double mirror?
Eyes
positioned atop
The produce aisle or the door
Of the library or the portal
Of
concourse security or
The corner convenience store
Bore straight down and
transmit
The passing topdown horror
To a screen near you, each
Self-exposure
explicit
As male baldness of speech.
The sightline of stranger and friend,
Which
once precluded you,
Is now by grace of machine
Most publicly your own
And
fingers the enemy,
Not the one with the bomb
But your own dissolving form,
The
skin that rides the skull.
The paleness of individual
Terror breaking through
Is
the communal view
As others join the self
In scheming never to end,
In
keeping the spirit safe
From its mortality.
©
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. In October, 2008, he was sent by
the Department of State to represent the United States at a literary conference
in northern India, followed by a week of readings in New Delhi and Mumbai.
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.
