I never guarded bodies or unloaded
Bags of black plastic
From a chopper. But I did my best
In your room with the ceiling fan
Hovered over the bed

This is not just another book of poetry. Michael Bugeja, who is now a professor at Ohio University, probably wouldn't know how to write just another book. As you might expect from someone who was a reporter during a war, he's there to tell you a story he found out too much about, as in "Duty."

I swear we were in a war.
There was blood, and in your belly
The shrapnel of stillborn
Pulled out piece by piece: a foot,
A leg, the tethered body finally
Cut from you....

This may be the author's story; it may be fiction. One has to know the author to know that. Whatever it is, Bugeja writes with such strength about this couple that you feel their hopes, terrors, tragedy, and later, their unexpected joy almost as if you'd been present.

...I want you to remind me
The snow was whiter than we'd ever seen it in Oklahoma
And that for one chill day toward sunset, we stopped
Crying as a baby would stop, suddenly, to play
In it and roll in the back yard one huge belly-
Ache of a snowball, layer on layer until stripes
Of dead grass showed below the bedroom window.

The loss of a child, as any mother or father who's experienced it can attest to, is a nightmare come to daylight, a sudden death no matter how it happens. And such a death deals a harder blow than any other because the grief is for what might have been, not for what was. And, as a sister-in-law could tell you, it is particularly ghastly when you go into labor with what the fetal monitor says is healthy and ready for this world, only to find at labor's end that you have to prepare for a funeral instead of for raising a child. Recollection hears the echo of a nurse who, when she heard that sister-in-law's vast scream, ran from the hospital in tears; one suspects this was not an unusual reaction.

He took calls, sent well-wishers away
With the kind word, and set up wreaths so window light
Rainbowed on the bed. He did all this, but would not eat.
It was a rebellion allowed at first, condoned even
As outlet, until they noted the fast was a strike
No hunger could break. So food was trayed in,
Complimentary, but still he refused. He was,
As a counselor put it, trying to terminate himself
Without too much attention. Days passed, nurses
Came as if to check on the wife, and made
Their reports. For a time, the wife
Did nothing. Then she shuffled to the cafe
And returned with a concession
Sandwich, stale and waferlike,
Held before him. He took it
As a sign of forgiveness....

Usually, our fathers missed such things until the aftermath, and felt a vague guilt or malaise for that, which they may still express decades later. But, at the behest of spouses who'd like a partner, not a patron, many sons of such men are now there, as the narrator of these poems was and is. What happened is no less a tragedy for his being there, and his guilt, however misplaced, is far more profound, but we expect something qualitatively different from we used to expect in such real events. We expect the difference because the narrator and his wife were in the room together, in the blood and gore and screaming. If you remember one of Robert Frost's most affecting poems, "Home Burial" from North of Boston, as moving as anything Frost ever wrote, it was set in a different world, with radically different lives from those of the narrator of The Visionary and his partner. While all grief, even at the noisiest wake, is in some sense private, Frost's couple suffered in terrible aloneness because neither was emotionally competent to perceive the other's grief. They were as at odds as any couple out of Strindberg. And that they are still recognizable in 1997 is a measure of how difficult it is to cross barriers once considered unbreachable, those between the emotional lives not only of men and women, but between any one person and another. In Bugeja's world, as believable now as Frost's was in 1913, things change:

My daughter stops long enough
For me to chin a fiddle. She's propped
Between pillows and the family mutt.
She's been fed, burped, diapered --
The crying has gone on all night.

The dog who naps through everything
Except blue grass
Bolts up to howl. The baby keels
Like timber across his tail,
Setting both of them off. I run....

Here, much later, in "The Last Resort," emerge other qualities that make The Visionary satisfying. One is how, in good storytelling fashion, Bugeja leads us from the sorrow of the parents of a stillborn child to the joy of their later adopted daughter. It's not a soupy fiction; it happens, just as it happened that the sister-in-law mentioned above had a daughter eighteen months later. Life does go on; joy is possible again, even though the shadows of the past linger, as they still do for that brother-in-law when he thinks of a son who never was. And as you would expect from a writer who's not only been a professor but a globe-trotting correspondent in war and peace, Bugeja doesn't pull punches. Throughout this book, there's never a sense of someone drawing back to avoid a difficult turn in the story, nor of someone withdrawing into private pain to the point where it becomes a spectacle. Instead Bugeja presents us with a gift that he's extracted from the raw materials of pain and joy, structured and polished with the craft and high of art of poetry, and delivered to us as a shared experience. You would do well to get your own copy of The Visionary. It will show you more than a little of how storytellers are supposed to work.

The Visionary

1996

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