The cover of "The Feast" by Walter Bargen.

A sample from Walter Bargen

By: Jessie Burche

Posted: 1/14/08

Walter Bargen became Missouri's first poet laureate Jan. 8. Bargen has had four books published with BkMk Press, a press that runs out of UMKC. Here are samples of Bargen's work. This poem, "Kristallnacht" is taken from Bargen's book "At the Dead Center of Day," which was published in 1997 by BkMk Press.

'Kristallnacht'
"By mid-November, the faces on the top steps
and porch railings, in rocking chairs
nudged by wind, in chairs too broken
to hold anything but the shadows of ashes;
and on straw bales swollen with rain,

on shocks of hay full of mold and warm
with decay, on cold mornings in fingers
of mist, the puffed out pumpkin faces
with lidless eyes shut in spite of themselves,
convinced there is nothing left.

In the best of times, on days
when their voices buzz low between
grins that are a whisper of ooze,
they remain thankful for a diet of knives.
When all else collapses on cold nights

when the sky is a splintering crystal,
in the flashlight among the rinds
of compost I find a flickering skin of carved
light, the Hasidic curl of thick stems
descending into the center of their faces."

Here's a selection from "The Feast" published by BkMk Press in 2004. "The Feast" is a book of prose poem sequences split into sections. This piece is called "Before the Beginning" and is from the first section of the book called "Belly of the Beast."

"This is what happens when he stands face to face with no, and no the true genius of the world. No, he won't sit on the potty, and so he sits wrapped in his mess for the rest of the day. No, he won't struggle with putting on his galoshes on a rainy morning, and so he walks to school barefoot, all the other kids laughing. No, he won't stand on the chair, lean among the flowers to kiss the face of someone who once loved to playfully cheat his at cards and torment him in other small delicious ways, then his frightened face is shoved up against death. No, he won't give the older boys his jacket, and after school is chased all the way home, barely staying ahead of the heavy swinging belt buckles. No, he won't eat his broccoli or spinach, or anything green that looks like the squashed insides of a caterpillar, and he falls asleep at the table, then falls out of the chair. No, he cannot say no, but he does. No, he won't to the barbarous city Nineveh, but instead heads for Tarshish, across a storm-riddled sea where he draws the short straw and is thrown overboard for God-only-knows-what-reason, and ends up living inside a great fish. Yes, no is the genius of the world."

Poems reprinted with permission from BkMk Press.
jburche@unews.com