George Bilgere will be reading some of his poems on A Prairie Home Companion this Saturday evening live from Town Hall in New York City.   Hear it Saturday evening 6-8pm or Sunday Morning 10am-noon on 89.7 WKSU.

Unwise Purchases

They sit around the house

Not doing much of anything: the boxed set

Of the complete works of Verdi, unopened.

The complete Proust, unread.

The French-cut silk shirts

Which hang like expensive ghosts in the closet

And make me look exactly

Like the kind of middle-aged man

Who would buy a French-cut silk shirt.

The reflector telescope I thought would unlock

The mysteries of the heavens

But which I only used once or twice

To try to find something heavenly

In the windows of the high-rise down the road,

And which now stares disconsolately at the ceiling

When it could be examining the Crab Nebula.

The 30-day course in Spanish

Whose text I never opened,

Whose dozen cassette tapes remain unplayed,

Save for Tape One, where I never learned

Whether the suave American

Conversing with a sultry-sounding desk clerk

At a Madrid hotel about the possibility

Of obtaining a room,

Actually managed to check in.

I like to think

That one thing led to another between them

And that by Tape Six or so

They’re happily married

And raising a bilingual child in Seville or Dayton.

But I’ll never know.

Suddenly I realize

I have constructed the perfect home

For a sexy, Spanish-speaking astronomer

Who reads Proust while listening to Italian arias,

And I wonder if somewhere in this teeming city

There lives a woman with, say,

A fencing foil she bought on a whim

Gathering dust in the corner

Near her unused easel, a rainbow of paints

Drying in their tubes

On the table where the guitar

She planned to learn to play last summer

And the summer before

Lies entombed in the permanent darkness

Of its locked case

Next to the abandoned chess set,

A woman who has always dreamed of becoming

The kind of woman the man I’ve always dreamed of becoming

Has always dreamed of meeting.

And while the two of them discuss star clusters

And Cezanne, while they fence delicately

In Castilian Spanish

To the strains of Rigoletto,

She and I will stand in the steamy kitchen,

Fixing up a little risotto,

Enjoying a modest cabernet,

While talking over a day so ordinary

As to seem miraculous.

                                                -George Bilgere