“The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor” will feature two poems by John Carroll University Associate Professor of English George Bilgere, Ph.D., this month: “Beautiful Country" on Saturday, Dec. 27, and “Living Will" on Tuesday, Dec. 30. Works by Bilgere have been featured more than 40 times on “The Writer’s Almanac.” The show is broadcast by public radio stations nationwide as well as on SiriusXM satellite radio. It also is available as a podcast. A member of John Carroll’s faculty since 1991, Bilgere has authored six collections of poetry. He has garnered grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pushcart Foundation, the Witter Bynner Foundation through the Library of Congress, and the Fulbright Foundation. Bilgere also was named a 2014 Creative Workforce Fellow by the Community Partnership for Arts & Culture in Cleveland.
Beautiful Country
When Dave calls from California to tell me his girlfriend is pregnant— it was an accident but she wants to keep it anyway, although Dave’s not so sure, he has his doubts; in fact, when he really thinks about it, not in this lifetime nor in any foreseeable lifetime does he see himself actually becoming a dad— I realize the two of them are about to embark upon a long and dangerous pilgrimage through a wilderness called Confusion, across a desert called Pain, and down into a rocky valley called Couples Counseling. They’re x-raying their relationship like a couple of art collectors trying to figure out if the Rembrandt they bought last month is a fake.
Living Will
When the doctor called at 3am to tell me that only a ventilator could keep my aunt alive at that point, I stood shivering in the dark kitchen, thinking about that word, ventilator. I envisioned a dark shaft of some sort in an old office building from the fifties, when my aunt was a young woman. Then I imagined being in that shaft, somehow hidden away behind a grill while an important meeting was going on in a paneled room full of big shots scribbling things on yellow legal pads. Millions of dollars were at stake. Someone’s career, maybe even their life, depended on what the important men did or said. But I was hidden in the ventilator shaft, safely out of bounds. I wanted to stay inside that word for as long as I could, its syllables like four rooms I could buy some time exploring. But it was so cold in the dark kitchen, and the doctor was waiting.