Category Archives: Books

Timberline Press, 122 pages, 2003
$20.00 (Illustrated by Mike Sleadd)

Selections:

HOUSE OF TURTLE

I can’t tell you where to start, maybe I don’t know,
or maybe I’m simply not ready for the responsibility,
though it has nothing to do with not wanting to help,
nothing to do with all the possible guilts that sweep

over us for not having loved enough, or been present
enough, or even not having stopped the car and moved
the turtle off the road, and finding the flattened mess
when we returned, having watched in the rearview

mirror another driver intentionally swerve. We must
take into account another time it was hopeless,
or just pointless, when we had not yet surrendered
hope, when the pond by the highway was drained

for a new apartment complex, the backhoe with its
claw sunk for the night into the breached embankment,
waiting for morning to again swallow another mouthful
of earth and spit it out. What more could be done,

the quitting-time traffic no longer able to dodge
those orphaned by the air, who crawled for other waters,
and over the asphalt the hundred or so moss-backed
shells were cracked and savaged flat. Perhaps this is

just a warning, like the children standing in a down-
pour shouting over whether running or walking
through the rain will leave them drier, even as the rain
falls harder, drenching their most refined arguments.

HIGHWAY FIFTY WEST

The engine is insistent, hungry, demanding to be fed more miles.
The windows rolled down, the long zipper of September locust
song is undone and falls into the rags of distance. In the last town

without a stop sign, light neatly folded the clapboard houses
into the envelope of long shadows. Even vultures are hungry
for the road, following it more closely than drivers, they tilt

and swivel their awkward wings low over the gravel shoulders
for what has left a humped stain. The Roman Emperor Nero commanded
Seneca to suicide, perhaps for telling him that if he wasn’t happy

with what he had, which was all the known world, it wouldn’t matter
if he possessed even an unknown empire. But then history’s fatal
collisions are not the same and will not be remembered on this road,

but relived in the small plastic-flowered crosses by an overpass.
The scarlet rash of sumacs bleed up hillsides. The sharp blue edge
of horizon cuts above soybean fields. In the drainage ditch cattail blades

are honed on yellow shafts of afternoon, and in the turbulent wakes of
passing traffic can be heard the clatter of ancient duels, frog and snake
fattening for hibernation. The bald monuments of road-cut rock display

the scars of exposure, drilling and dynamite, and begin to glow in the full-
face of late sun. On a tarnished plaque below a statue of Columbus in a square
in Barcelona, on a similar sunny fall day, can be read the inscription: “You

have to navigate. You do not have to live.” On this road that we desperately want
to disobey—it makes no difference if we suddenly wrench the steering,
swerve, hit or miss, we crash through the bronzed light of evening.

Timberline Press, 59 pages, 2001
Out of print.

Selections:

IN HARMONY

This is occupied country.
Aliens have landed
but no one’s listening to the radio.
Water towers are graffiti-stricken Martians
invading on tip-toe.
They spew forth hard water.
We drink and are overwhelmed.
Time soaks our rusting bodies.

The streets are windswept
passages of history.
In low-angled evening light
the storefronts are bright
as the Seven Cities of Cibola.
After school the Dog ‘n Suds
is Normandy Beachhead,
the landing vehicles
filled with newly licensed
sixteen-year-olds.
Memory fails us recalling
only the past.

The retired town planner
wants to speed up traffic.
Get rid of the bottlenecks.
The streets are rerouted.
The black arrows all point
one way. No one comes back.

TO PUT BY

He walks to the back of the house he’s lived in all his life and finds a room that he’s never entered. He opens the door and feels along the wall for the light switch. How strange to work both his palms over something cold, flat, vertical, and in the pitch of darkness, extending to the infinity of corners. For a moment, he’s falling upward, sideways, and down. He secures his feet to the floor and turns. Something long and thin brushes his cheek. He spins from vertigo to fear. Quickly stepping back, he swings his arm to defend himself and his hand tangles in the pull chain. A dusty bulb shrouded in cobwebs ignites, as if a clod of earth were glowing from the low ceiling.

He coughs from the musty odor of things sealed and undisturbed. From floor to ceiling, he is surrounded by shelves. On each shelf he sees old glass canning jars. Thousands of Ball jars crowded into rows and labeled, the hand-lettering faded beyond reading. A surviving “e” here, a “cl” there. He looks for pickles, peas, pears, parsnips. It’s not what he finds. From the top shelf, he pulls down jars packed with cirrus, cumulus, nimbus, stratus clouds, all of them sealed tight. He sees all the faces and animals and the grotesqueries that ever came to him, lying on his back in fields staring up at the passing days: the flocks of sheep, herds of buffalo, legends of Roman soldiers, flotillas, armadas; the islands, archipelagos, continents where he wanted to spend his summers and falls; and the dancing Katchinas, the spirits that surely must be behind it all.

On the lower shelf are jars of wind. There’s the one that softly dissolved him as he sat on the porch one long late afternoon. In the next, the wind that pushed waves into his boat as he crossed a lake, and the gust that caught his kite, breaking the twine, releasing him to blow across a field. The other jars are aswirl with what hasn’t arrived.

There are jars of snowflakes, each classified according to its intricate frozen lattice. There are sunsets packed like colored sand in shot glasses sold in stores along the highway in Tucumcaria and Yuma. Jars of light rain and mists, deluges and floods. Forty days and forty nights of jars. Jars of extinct bird songs, jars of grackle crackle and sparrow twitter, so many he can’t reach, sitting too far back.

He finds the shelf full of his breathing: the very first one that burned his lungs into life, the longest one when he fell from the oak breaking his arm, all of those from the hospital waiting for his father to die, all those inhaling the fragrance of another’s hair, the new jars appearing at that moment to take in the breathing of this room.

Singing Wind Press, Gentile Press, 48 pages, 1980
Out of print.

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BEIRUT

Machine guns inhabit the rooftops
like hungry crows.
Bullets peck the library
city hall the cobble streets
Allah’s forehead.

To the east
the mountains belch dust
as artillery fires into the city
planting the bloom of brown orchids
on the beach apartments
on the Hilton
in courtyards filled
with the shattered rosary of bricks.

People are opening their bodies
for the world to read
the print still wet and so red
it pours out a stoplight
on Broadway and Ninth
in downtown Columbia, Missouri.

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Timberline Press, 51 pages, 1999
Out of print.

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MAP TO THE PARTY

IF you wait, you grow old, nothing
more. Traveling light is your only
illuminating illusion.

Either way you can’t remain
time and place inseparable.
To settle is to amass names:

lespedeza, hickory, Providence Road.
To accelerate is to compress
latitude and longitude,

to shoulder wind in every
direction, to wear a hole
in the already worn cartography.

To grow old is to grasp sheer
granite faces, to negotiate
declivities and eruptions

of aspiration, to disbelieve
coded legends, to find instead
water’s divides, to follow the rule

of thumb-civilization’s always
down stream a steaming ruin,
a crumbling repository, a flow,

a seepage, the final flush
to sea level and lower. Buried in
the alluvium: Etruscan bronzes,

eroding pyramids coral-encrusted
hub caps, cracked glass fishing
floats. On an oil-blackened spit

the aging Archimedian rabble
gathers to count the grains
again, praying for a mistake.

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Water Breathing Air is the fifth collection of poetry by Bargen, whose poem “The Good Red Rose” won the 1995 St. Louis Poetry Center open competition.  The poems in his latest offering often begin with a joyful moment that is that is quickly juxtaposed with a jolt of reality, such as an accident , an argument or one of his recurring images, a flood.  The canvas of his writing is scarred with the effects of modern industry and the betrayal of nature by man, and images of nature’s resistance run like a current through this collection.

“Sorting Snapshots”  is a more contemporary poem in which the narrator is overwhelmed by memories that remain unexplained.  Memories, like water swell and overflow, and they can dilute the very meaning of what they represent.

The poem reaches an epiphany by revealing the narrators underlying desire to preserve memories.  Camped on the floor, surrounded by photographs, the narrator is determined to put them in an album.  But the narrator is invaded by the very memories and can’t go through with the cutting and trimming:

“What’s cut away

is the peripheral and its edges, thin

strips of the unnecessary, the clutter that obscures the borders and blinds

the focus.”

The narrator feels guilty discarding unworthy moments and falters.  Finishing the job would mean sacrificing the insignificant, and looking back, the narrator realizes it was at those moments that the mind was free and unburdened.  In the future, as Bargen artfully depicts, we’ll be no more remembered than the background faces in a photograph. 

“And then there’s

the overexposed, the double exposed,

and the underexposed; it’s all the avoidable

accidents and the way we edit our lives;

what we must forget, the litter of vision that

swells and turns all our faces to backgrounds.”

Bargen’s poems speak in the language of water but his reflections don’t dampen the human spirit. Rather, his images -floating on the waves of hope and possibility-can inspire and rejuvenate.

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Timberline Press, 45 pages, 1995
Out Of Print.

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NEWTON REVISITED

GRAVITY and motion and some thing massed
to go lower, precipitous prescription,
as when I watched a man in El Dorado
Canyon, dressed only in red silk
shorts and tennis shoes, scale
a plunging granite face higher
than any city building. His thigh muscles
finer than braided rope, each spiraling
sinew compounded by another. Ascending
he grew smaller, angelic, and sometimes
swung upside down, reaching blindly out
and up over a ragged ledge, feeling for
a finger-thin crack or feeble shelf
of heaven to grab and hold. He was half
spider climbing a fissured igneous web,
and when he reached the top, fists
of lighting punched through the bellying
clouds, The canyon became a thunderous
well as rain obscured and turned
the mountain into a vertical river.

I waited out the storm in a cave,
considered his survival near naked
on a freezing mountain, his only way
down a slippery escarpment. In the middle
of the downpour, he walked up soaked
and shivering, smiling as he told how
he was unable to see his hands knuckle in
crevices, his wrists buried in the sheering
water, and carried into its current to the bottom
in a flowing firmament, until he stepped
on grounded principles.

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There’s a boldness I love, which perks up the eyes and ears in these days full of indistinguishable detritus from large and small press alike.

Bargen leaves a strong impression.  This is from the opening of “No Matter How Hard We Try”: 

The wind is really nothing:

a few overheated or under cooled spaces

hyperventilating, pushed this way

or that by a few points of pressure.

Maybe it throws around a little rain

or hail at the edges, and the swizzle

stick of lightning mixes winds itself

up into a coil sucking up chickens

and yachts.

There’s that uncommonly strong imagery that appeals, the layering .  But it’s moved and blended, stirred, by skillful enjambment and language choice…

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Timberline Press, 39 pages, 1990
Out Of Print

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YET OTHER WATERS
for Bobette

You could not step twice in the same rivers;
for others and yet other waters…
–Heraclitus

With sand to shake form damp towels;
to work out of our shoes on the porch
step, turning them upside down;

to wash out hair and scalp, the softest
folds of skin; and later to fall
from the novel, its cover slightly

curled from too much sun, and there
on the desk, not to read, but to find
not gook reason to continue, seeing each

grain, each rounded edge and prismatic
center, a kaleidoscope of grit to be swept
clean and carried off… but then I can’t

stop recalling: pulling her close, wet
and naked, chilled by the tidal wind,
nipples puckered, the curve of her spine

drifted with sand, and the waves breaking,
breaking…Is this what
Heraclitus meant, that we could not

step into the same body twice, whether
it is a river, ourselves, or another,
that we are not just the same slipping

away, but he sand we walk over
and carry with us, caught in our cuffs
and shoes, is forever changed,

and changes us, though love may cling
like each grain late in the day
on dunes still leaning against a winded sea.

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BKMK Press–UMKC, 36 pages, 1997
$6.00

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THE ELVES AT KATYN FOREST

It started during the night after the burning of many cities.
It started when the soldiers in uniforms the color of miles
of muddy road began the forced march of the defeated.
The mud of the vanquished and the mud of the victors

indistinguishable. Prisoners became guards, guards prisoners.
Dressed in fear and exhaustion, no one any longer cared.
It started in a faraway country, years before, when money
was spent in wheelbarrows for a loaf of bread; when someone

in a place signed his name in water; when a cigarette butt
on a sidewalk was punishable death and conscription
It started in a shirt pocket crowded with rats, in a bowl full
of glass eyes blinking in all directions in a field hospital.

So the long muddled lines drudged into a dark forest
to a strange mumbled cadence-the belch of boots being sucked in
and out of mired miles-fifty thousand struggling vowels
and rifle reports the only consonants spoken over the dead

guarding the ditches. Soon the forest turned blacker than
its wet pines. Fore weeks, the raw upturned earth burst
into small blooms of brass buttons and bones. An entire country
stopped breathing. Each year the trees grew more bloated.

A half century later, out of Katyn Forest miles of mud-caked
uniform march. At dust-choked crossroads villagers look for
passing cars. The sucking sound, the faint moans, only wind twisting
through the gargoyled and steepled churches. Couples stroll along

rivers, watching their children run ahead. Cottonwoods sail
their leaves on the reddening current. The evening grows faint;
the sun’s pulse weak on the water. The children shiver, listening
to stories of elves who return to retake the country the lost.

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“…this chapbook has the finish of a careful, longtime practitioner.  At the Dead Center of Day is a carefully built arrangement of poems , a journey through some of the genuine abominations of the twentieth century-the agonies we withdraw from unless pressed to the task by someone like Bargen, who reminds us that we dare not forget.  Most of these poems are not just staged shockers, but responsible, vivid holdings of the imagery of horror.  They contain genuine feeling and each is a subtle, cautionary deliverance.”

 “Bargen concludes his chapbook with an extraordinary work, “The Elves of Katyn Forest,”  which in essence delivers his final statement on the power of endurance in the face of contemporary horrors.  The poem begins, “It started during the night after the burning of many cities.  It started when the soldiers in uniforms the color of miles / of muddy road began the forced march of the defeated. / The mud of the vanquished and the mud of the victors / indistinguishable.”   With frightening precision Bargen has “the long muddled lines drudged into a dark forest /to a strange mumbled cadence-the belch of boots being sucked in/and out of mired miles-fifty thousand struggling vowels/and rifle reports the only consonants spoken over the dead/guarding the ditches.”  The entire country stops breathing. The trees become bloated.  He concludes his poem:

A half century later, out of Katyn Forest miles of mud-caked

Uniforms march.  At dust-choked crossroads villagers look for

Passing cars.  The sucking sound, the faint moans, only wind twisting

Through the gargoyled and steepled churches.  Couples stroll along

Rivers, watching their children run ahead.  Cottonwoods sail

Their leaves on the reddening current.  The evening grows faint;

The sun’s pulse weal on the water.  The children shiver, listening

to stories of elves who return to retake the country they lost.

“Walter Bargen says more about the hate and cruelty of our time in a

 few lines than does all the exhibitionist stomping and bellowing of a 

dozen slam group.

-Paul Zimmer of The Georgia Review–

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Reflections on the Year of the Great Flood
Pekitanoui Publications, 58 pages, 1994
Out of print.

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INTRODUCTION

What happens when the rivers we live beside swell out of their banks, as the did in the nation’s heartland in the summer of 1993, and we find ourselves wet up to our knees, and then to our chests and chins? What happens when the door knob to the post office is below the still rising waters and we find ourselves dreaming about murky depths even after we have reached higher ground, and the newspaper, the radio and television are projecting ever higher apocalyptic crests?

What happens in part is that our imaginations begins working overtime, attempting to accommodate and understand the magnitude of houses and towns being washed away, of a twenty minute drive to work that now takes four hours, of Lear jets turned into winged canoes, of coffins resurrected from their tranquil resting places, of trying to stop a river with fifty pound bags of sand.

What we are seeking is a context that will help us explain this phenomenon, and that is what all the writers in this anthology have done.

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BKMK Press–UMKC, 63 pages, 1990
Out of print.

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INTERRUPTION

For a moment
I could not remember
what brought us
to this place
flat on our backs
and naked. We should
not have been talking,
or
trying to talk.

The room was too
still, the house
even more so.

The bed was a small
organ, and in the middle
of a long slow stroke,
when the hand is
an exquisite mind,
the phone rang
and like a fool
I answered.

A small shaky voice
from the twentieth century
crawled into my ear.

When I returned,
arms extended,
I had to answer again,
then we rolled over,
back to back,
and wandered off
to sleep.

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