My Dad pulled over for Dairy Queens and Ringnecked Pheasants. Yours?

Aria
Jussi Bjoerling, that soaring tenor,
Was pulled down from the air.
My father pulled off to the shoulder

And closed his eyes.
Nessun Dorma,
It might have been,
or Cielo e Mar.

Hotter than Hades in the car
But I knew enough by then
To shut up. Even my sisters
For once stopped their idiot fidgeting.

Somewhere that summer, Bjoerling
Was dying of booze.
My father had lost a lung. No more
Singing forever.

Through the bridal veil
Of a cigarette, my mother
Stared hard down the highway,
Waiting for it to be over.

George Bilgere from Haywire

(Winner of the 2006 Swenson Poetry Award, Haywire, by George Bilgere, is a collection of poems from an accomplished poet with a direct and unpretentious voice. In images bright and dark, tangible and immanent, Bilgere brings us time after time to the inner reaches of a contemporary life. In subjects ranging from adolescent agony to the loss of parents to the comic pain of middle age, he finds no reason to turn away his gaze, and ultimately no reason not to define himself in joy.)