Vox Populi
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Tony Gloeggler: September
After Jesse gives me the quick hug
I still have to ask for, he says paper
and walks to the table. I unlock
the room that’s called the office,
come out carrying a blank sheet,
settle into my seat. He prints
September 6 2019 across the top.
I ask, What should we do today?
He always begins with the city bus
like he’s spent either all morning
or his whole life waiting to ride
that bus into town and I feel
I am fulfilling my one holy
purpose helping to make this guy
happy. We continue down the page:
Starbucks, Blackbird Books, a long
slow Deerborn bus loop where
he asks to switch seats at least
twenty times and I shake my head
sideways, beg him to please zip
his lip as he laughs so loud
that everyone looks our way until
he moves closer, widens his eyes
and stares longingly into mine.
I am forced to say okay, just once.
He slides into a new seat, smiles,
then says, change, one more please,
while I make faces, act enraged.
.
We grab jackets, file out the door,
take the elevator and hit the street.
He walks fast, I move slow as shit.
He keeps looking back at me, down
the street, in case a bus appears
and we wind up trotting a few blocks
to catch it. But no, we can take it easy.
I start thinking about Brooklyn,
carrying Jesse out to the curb
for his first day of mainstream
schooling. With his six year old legs
wrapped around my waist, I felt
like his father. His mom aimed
a camera at us, juggled his backpack
filled with Winnie the Pooh books,
his lunch box stocked with Oreos,
Extra Spicy Doritos, the only things
he ate back then, and an index card
with all his information printed on it.
She was worried about the other kids
bullying him, laughing at his flapping
fingers, constant percolating sounds,
out-of-nowhere leaps of frustration
and delight. But I knew he had no use
for other kids, wouldn’t acknowledge
their existence unless things escalated
to physical cruelty. Jesse carries everything
he needs inside himself, stored beneath
his beautiful blue eyes. Sometimes,
I try my best to be more like him.
.
We had driven a few practice runs,
repeated short simple phrases
while he looked out the car window,
hummed. We parked in front
of the school building, walked up
the steps, moved around back
and let him fly high on the swings.
Still, I’m not sure he knew where
he was going that morning, how
long he was expected to stay, what
they might try to make him do there,
or if he was afraid of not coming
back and ever seeing us again. When
the bus arrived, his mom lifted him
out of my arms, nuzzled his face
with swarming kisses that tickled him,
then finally placed him on the ground.
He walked up the steps casually,
that light bounce in each of his steps
as if he knew where he was going.
He found a window seat. We waved
until the yellow bus turned the corner.
.
Today, I lean in the doorway shade
of the nail salon. Jesse stands
ten feet away, sometimes taking
a quick little jump as cars flash by
or he turns to trace the lettering
in the shop’s window and I try
to keep him from scraping it off.
Periodically, he walks over to me,
time please. I dig through pockets,
hand him my cell. Giving it back,
he says, Friday October 4, come back,
two nights, Sunday October 6, go home,
Tony New York, and I have to answer,
Yes, for sure or the whole world stops.
When the bus pops into sight, he skips
to the curb, bouncing on the balls
of his feet and waits for the door
to unfold. He drops five quarters
into the slot and walks down
the aisle like he owns the bus
and every single person on it.
Copyright 2023 Tony Gloeggler. First published in January Review.
Tony Gloeggler’s poetry collections include What Kind of Man (NYQ Books, 2020). He is a lifelong New Yorker.
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Excellent. Perfect details to make you feel every moment of it.
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I agree. The poem is perfectly rendered.
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With many thanks for the message dear poet Tony Gloeggler , sent for me:
The difference between something that is poetry and something that is not poetry is as clear as the difference between life and death.
A professional reader of poetry immediately recognizes that what she or he is reading is poetry or not. Whether a poem with weight and rhyme, or in the form of lines below each other.
Let’s remember that turning to free verse was because traditional poetry or rhythmic poetry put the poet in a tight spot and forced him to use words that needed to be said in order to observe the rhyme.
But one of the beautiful and necessary characteristics of a good poem is brevity, which means that the poet can say the most meanings with the fewest words. Unfortunately, since free verse or new poetry seems to be easy, for many, this illusion has arisen that they can write whatever they want ,in the form of short or long lines and imagine that they have written a poem. Many of the poems that we see published these days are actually short or long stories. Some of these stories are good stories like September by Tony Gloeggler and some of them are not even good stories.
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In his poems, Tony Gloeggler turns colloquial speech into measured verse which fits the voice he uses to tell humane stories. Many Americans are afraid of anything which sounds like “poetry” so they prefer poems which sound like a guy in the coffee shop just talking. Frost had a similar effect on his readers a hundred years ago, but his language seems dated now. Re-read Frost’s iconic poems ‘The Death of the Hired Man’ and ‘A Servant to Servants.’ Gloeggler is writing contemporary versions of those masterpieces.
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I love this poem. He brings us into these worlds with such heart. “What Kind of Man” is a favorite book of mine. Thank you for posting!
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Thanks, Clayton!
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I love this. Think of my grandson, now in middle school, partially mainstreamed. So sweet and he loves to look at car engines, play piano, can only eat gluten free but won’t eat most things, and I think about his smile and his hugs.
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Jesse carries everything
he needs inside himself, stored beneath
his beautiful blue eyes. Sometimes,
I try my best to be more like him.
It’s sentences like this one that make me so very much admire Tony Gloeggler’s emotional intelligence & courage!
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Tony Gloeggler does it every time. He moves me. Lovely poem, as always. His work makes me think of George Bilgere. I am fan of both.
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Thanks for mentioning George Bilgere — I going to re-read him, it’s been years and years…
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I can’t stop myself from immodestly pointing out that George Bilgere’s best book is The White Museum which I published at Autumn House Press. Here’s the link in case you want to order it:
https://www.autumnhouse.org/our-authors/bilgeregeorge/
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So moving. I always love his poems. ________________________________
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Why this short story is written in the form of a long poem? Does just breaking the verses turn a text into a poem?
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Thanks for raising this question, Farideh. I’d be interested to know what our Vox Populi readers believe is the difference between prose and poetry in the American language. What does Gloeggler gain by breaking the sentences into lines? What would be lost if the piece were laid out as prose?
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Dear Farideh: the author, Tony Gloeggler, asked me to post this response to your question: “I wonder about that sometimes too. My lines tend to be equal length, similar syllable counts which establishes I think a breath for the reader to go with. In my mind, I hope the words I use for line breaks and the words that begin lines do a better job of creating, controlling different rhythms in a piece with stops and enjambments. Also, it allows a reader to focus easier on separate images than if the line went to the end of the page and hopefully it helps to accentuate any sound play I put in. There have been a few times where editors asked me if I would turn pieces into a prose poem and it never read, sounded the same, right to me.”
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Superb Tony!
Thankyou.
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Thanks, Sean. I love the way the poet raises the mundane details of a day to the level of a moral journey.
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