More Chris Bursk poems

Our September issue features a tribute to beloved contributor Chris Bursk, who died this past June. Bursk had been publishing poetry in The Sun since 1977. He also wrote the essay “Last Writes,” which was listed as distinguished in the 2021 Best American Essays anthology.

He wrote sixteen books of poetry, won numerous honors, and was celebrated for his humanitarian efforts, which included teaching poetry to prisoners. He taught for fifty years at Bucks County Community College, where he was an enduringly popular professor. He was frequently on the faculty at The Sun’s weekend writing retreats, where workshop participants described him as energetic, humble, and generous; he shared his personal e-mail with students, encouraging them to keep in touch. One participant noted that “his care and enthusiasm were contagious.”

The poems that appear in our tribute to Chris Bursk are just a small sample of the fifty-plus poems that have been published The Sun. We hope you will enjoy a few more.

A Father’s Kiss

I
Your father’s on! Every Monday night
my mother called me downstairs
to sit before the television for Marketing on the Move!
How many boys’ dads were trumpeted onto a stage,
had their own theme music?
My father put at ease the most prickly CEO,
got the Federal Reserve Board chairman to chuckle,
the president of General Motors and the UAW leader to swap
stories. By show’s end,
the Russian ambassador was showing pictures of his children
to my dad. My father smiled at us
from inside the box.
He waved goodbye to thousands of homes.
Like God, my father was often away
doing business in another part of the world.
Like the sun, he traveled
to foreign places: Lisbon, Vienna, Istanbul, Cairo, Nairobi.
I said the names of the cities over and over.
That’s how I learned geography.
I pressed against my father’s door
for a glimpse of him, his exhaustion heroic
like a warrior’s.
In the morning, when he was gone again,
I’d slip into his room,
try on his boxer shorts, test his razor,
reach under the covers and feel the hollow
his body had left behind.

II
On his rare days home, my father liked to undress
and lie down on the roof porch,
his arms open wide,
his legs spread
as if making an x, a target, a location
for the sun to concentrate all its energies:
on the groin,
the swarthy member nestled there on its flung-down sac
as if it were the seat of the soul
and my father were drawing light to it,
all the light he could.
What if I’d moved as quietly as the light did,
eased out my window,
across the roof? What if I’d knelt beside my father,
run my hands across his exposed ribs,
his long legs? I wanted to be as intimate
as the light had been. Trace his thin calves,
his ankles’ spidery veins,
even his tired feet
cocked to the side. Like someone blind,
I wanted to read
the line of my father’s jaw,
the story of his mouth.

III
The summer I turned fifteen,
my father, naked except for his slippers,
began to appear at my bedroom door,
pushing it open
as if he had news that couldn’t wait
till he was dressed. He’d stand next to my bed
and stay till
I glanced up. Time to get out of bed,
he’d say,
then pad off as if that was all he’d wanted
to tell me. All day, I’d hate myself
for even having thought of
looking, lifting
with my fingertips
his penis, its drooping head
like a flower I was simply tilting back to the light.

IV
In the dark of his side of the car,
my father would start to say something,
then stop. I’d hear him
drawing in deep breaths, like those a diver takes
just before going under.
I wasn’t going to make anything easy for this man,
comfortable with everyone
but his son. What did he expect?
That I’d feel a tug on the line
and pull him up?
Rescue him? I was used to wishing him
dead. After years of distance between us,
resentment was safer
than hope for a young man,
rage more respectable
than confusion. I held to it.
It was the one sure principle of my life.

V
What if my father and I had headed off together,
just the two of us,
on a trip that’d last
so long it would finally exhaust all our silences
and we’d begin talking
so much it’d become natural
for me to rest my hand on his arm to press a point home,
punch his shoulder when he made a bad joke,
nudge him when he started to get sleepy?
Maybe I’d lift my hand to his face,
graze the stubble of his cheek
as if I were still a child who understood nothing
except by touch.
Maybe I’d lie down, nestle my head in his lap,
curl my arm around his thigh.
It is always then I imagine my father swerving,
the car skidding, no guardrail
able to stop us. Flung out of the car,
we stagger onto a field of snow
only to find under us a mirror
breaking, a whole lake
crumbling beneath our feet.
Here is where the fantasy always leads. It is dark.
We are alone, far from shore,
sinking through the ice,
arms flailing,
going down, both of us crying out
like brothers trying to save each other,
borne under by each other’s weight,
drowning in each other’s arms.

VI
Let go, I beg
and uncurl my father’s fingers. He won’t
drop his hand from the rail on his bed.
Help me, I ask, and he does — finally —
let me roll him to the side,
loosen the tape of his briefs, loosen also
with warm (but not too
warm) water the dried fecal matter,
wipe it from his inner thigh,
peel back the scrotum,
lifting and scrubbing (but not too hard),
at each step rinsing the washcloth,
draping it back around my fingers
so I can probe through it
the little purse mouth of the anus,
the drowsy penis,
every part of my father’s soiled loins.
I do my best — and I guess
it is OK, because my father falls
back asleep. Hardly awake myself,
I finish changing his diapers
and, just as I used to with each of my infant sons,
I kiss his brow — as close to the dreams there
as I can get. A pretty ending,
one might say of this goodnight kiss —
except for the basin of muddied water,
the smears that won’t wash off the sheets,
not even with rubbing,
every dark streak that refuses to be persuaded
from the weave of my father’s blanket,
from the soiled nightshirt I can’t pull off
without waking him.
I want all that touches my father
to be spotless, to smell sweetly
of vitamin-E cream and baby powder.
I want my father immaculate,
unstained. How can I go back to bed now,
abandon him like this,
all my work left incomplete?

VII
What do we expect of our fathers?
That they make a final, legendary journey back,
travel whatever distance they must
to reach us, appear as ghosts in our new houses,
sit by our beds,
and speak in such a way that
we at last can speak, too?
Do we really hope that they might leave us at last
with a kiss,
and that kiss be so right
it explains everything that confused us as children,
each puzzling grief,
each unfathomable longing?

VIII
For an entire week, when I was four
and you and I were both afraid
Mother was never going to be released from the hospital,
at bedtime you led me to the window
I loved best, Father, the one that opened like a door,
and we looked up at the stars
as if we had the power to reach them.
You told me stories of a flying horse,
swung me onto the back of Pegasus,
and then pulled yourself up behind
and wrapped your arms around me.
We are crossing the burning floors of suns,
you said. We are walking on beds of starlight.
Don’t be afraid, son.
We are riding bareback now
on a horse with wings.

— February 1996

Unselected Poems

I
You’ve published enough books, old man.
Let someone else have a turn.
The letter doesn’t say that,
but it might as well.
Might as well tell him, too,
that he’s exceeded his limit
on walks with his dog
or pickup basketball games
with his granddaughter
or afternoons saving the world
with the help of his grandson
and some plastic dolphins.

II
Please forgive my verbs for working so hard.
Hard work is all they’ve ever known.
Maybe not the best cover letter
for an old man to submit
to the young editors at university presses.

III
It’s raining. It’s often raining when I write.
The drops throw themselves against the window.
They want to be in a poem, too.
They don’t care which one.

IV
What are you writing about?
asks my four-year-old granddaughter.
She expects I’ve put her in yet another poem,
and she wants out. Now.

V
I’m sorry, my wife tells me
when I open the letter that says exactly
what I was afraid it would.
It’s the same voice she uses
when she cups her hand around a moth
and walks it to the door
and watches it dart off.

VI
How do others do it: sit at their desks
and labor over poems
in the hope that maybe a magazine
named after a flower or a constellation
might be interested in the day
their mother forgot them at the rest stop
or their cat decided to stop eating forever
or they fell in love with the color yellow
or looked in the mirror and saw a dead sister?

VII
Lullwater, Crab Orchard, Pegasus,
Maverick Duck, Main Street Rag,
Moccasin, Katydid, Nimrod, Taproot,
Seaweed Sideshow Circus,
Bottom Dog, Milkweed,
Red Moon — I could make a poem
out of the places that have returned my poems.
How can my words travel to RainTown
or Chattahoochee or Cimarron
or Cream City or Cold Mountain
or the River Styx or the Pleiades
and come back unchanged?
Adastra, Anabioisis, Anhinga, Apalachee,
Aquarius, Axe Factory.
I’m working my way through the alphabet.
Every time I go to the mailbox,
I’m one step closer to Zephyr, Zoetrope,
Zombie Logic, and a world record.

VIII
Say a man writes 2 poems a week for 50 years
— take away 1 poem for every week
his hands got distracted
with a papier-mâché Mount Vesuvius
his daughter was molding
or a fort he was building with his Cub Scouts
or a protest sign he held up at the statehouse.
You do the math:
52 weeks times 2 poems a week equals 104,
minus 15 neglected poems equals 89,
times 50 years equals 4,450,
minus 52 for the long year his mother took to die,
minus 26 for the six months his father took to die.
That leaves 4,372 poems by the time he’s 70.
Maybe 400 or so, if he’s lucky, make their way
into print, which leaves 3,972 poems
just waiting to be thrown away when he dies.
But, look, he’s at work on yet another poem.

IX
Why do I keep writing? Maybe because
words ask the same toughness of an old man
or woman as they would of a young one:
to be seventy — or eighty, or ninety —
and still be held to a code of honor.
Poems don’t want excuses.

X
The trees must have noticed
my attention wandering.
I look out the window to find them
holding up their latest work.
Their first drafts have turned incandescent.
Who’d believe anything as ordinary
as a maple could have such an extraordinary
vocabulary, with so many variations
on red and orange and yellow?
While I’ve been dawdling,
the trees have been busy revising.
The light’s the only critic they trust.
They count on the sun to polish
their scribbling, to see their first drafts
all the way to print. What would we ever do
without such independent publishers?

— January 2014

O Beauty, Fugitive Beauty

What am I to do with all the poems
where my father implored beauty
to reveal herself,
addressed her gallantly
like a jilted lover, rebuked her sharply,
hundreds of heroic couplets
willed to me, a language so fired and faceted
he might have been cutting glass?
An ache that is buoyant fire.
Fire in my heart and head,
an ache that will never tire
until I be dead.
A man imagines his affliction a ship
he is captain of — a mighty galleon he is sailing
out of the harbor,
past the bell buoys at their thankless chores,
the farthest beacons,
long years, widening latitudes.
The waves may rise before him,
the sky fill with lamentations, but he will weep louder.
If the lightning throws itself in his path,
he will thrust it aside,
steer his entire crew safely home.
But, no, suffering is just a boat large enough for one,
a patched-up centerboard,
a single sail,
a difficult crossing.

— March 2000

Notes

1
Fucking bitch. You mess with me 
and I kill you.
You mine. At first I crunch up the paper,
the note Jesse was careless enough
to leave around
after class. It sits beside me now,
loosens its fist,
unfolds by itself.
I keep crumpling it up just to see it breathe,
open up again.


2
Why do I keep coming back to this jail,
shouting, pounding my fist on the desk,
whistling, falling on the floor,
clutching my heart?
Look, if you’re not going to pay attention, okay.
But at least be honest,
get up from your seat,
and right in my face give me the fuck-you finger.
Finally a few students will look up,
even the couple in the corner
will stop fondling each other under the table.
Is this the only reason I’m here,
so Annette can brush against Bobby D.,
rub her leg against his?
This afternoon, when the women
couldn’t come to class,
some of the men actually stuck around,
spent the hour talking seriously —
about jailhouse romance,
trying to define it: how one needs a woman
to look for across the cafeteria,
beyond the fence at yard-out, somebody
to smuggle notes to, poems
copied off greeting cards, folded
into small squares and slipped
into cigarette packs.
It’s not the women’s fault,
Lorenzo said. But none of us talk straight
when they’re here, none of us.
We’ve got too many Cadillacs, T-birds,
custom-made Mercedes
driving around this room.
We’re too busy spending the thousands
we’ve got stashed
somewhere, just for the right woman.


3
Lorenzo loves robbing clothing stores,
gazing into their mirrors
so he can see himself holding a gun
on all those smartly dressed men,
imagining himself stepping into the glass,
the perfect getaway.
This afternoon I tried to get him to say more
about his wrestling scholarship,
why he gave it up when his father died,
along with his collection of math books,
his beloved calculus.
How come he won’t write about
when he was a boy?
But no, he’ll show me instead page after page
from a book he wants me to help him finish,
about out-of-the-body travel,
each journey of his recorded,
each waking cry witnessed by cellmates
and guards,
date and time,
all the unexplained phenomena.


4
What am I to do with Michael?
He’s in detention again.
Today I had to unclench his hand
from his pillow,
those fingers too long, too powerful
for the skinny body that’s an embarrassment
to him, seventeen, the prison’s baby,
a boy whose soft features won’t blunt
for years probably, and then
much to his relief.
I rubbed his shoulders, lifted his face
so he couldn’t pretend to be
falling back asleep.
What do you fucking care.
I wanted to get hit.
I wanted some evidence to show the Warden,
a bruise the size of a hubcap.
And when Michael pulled down his shorts,
wasn’t he punishing me for my naivete,
my advice. He’d rehearsed in his cell
as I’d suggested, whispering the words
as if this time he might stay calm
and the guards would have to listen,
admire his logic. Fuck off.
I know you’re just trying to help,
but fuck off, won’t you?
He went on lacing and unlacing
one of his torn sneakers.
It’s not my fault. It really isn’t.
They shouldn’t have done this to me. You
shouldn’t have let them. Then he was pressing
into the dark of my shoulder, pounding his fists
against me, this righteous sobbing anger,
this rage that sometimes he thinks is all he has,
all he can count on.


5
As usual, Will was waiting for me
after class and as usual
he wouldn’t say anything
till I coaxed him — it had to be my idea,
not his, to talk. Part of the story
he’d told the cops: Annie had been beaten up,
then raped by her old boyfriend
who’d claimed she had money of his.
She’d begged Will not to come over,
to give her a few days
before they saw each other again.
Will hadn’t told the cops he’d been drinking
with friends, one who had a gun,
and they’d gone over to the ex-boyfriend’s
apartment building,
knocked on the door, and when
it’d been opened
Will had pushed his fists right away
into the man’s stomach. His friends
had held the man
when he’d crumpled over, and Will
had to lift his head
with one blow, before
with the other he could relocate
the man’s belly.
But when the woman began to scream,
when she called out the man’s name
and Will realized this was the wrong person,
the wrong apartment,
still he didn’t leave,
he didn’t stop shoving his fist
into the man’s gut till his friends
drew him away,
and still he wouldn’t be persuaded
from the parking lot,
he had the gun out
and this was how the cops had found him.
What else could I do? Let the creep
get away with what he’d done? I still had to
find him, didn’t I?
What would you do if your wife had been raped?
Would you sit down and draw up
a list of alternatives?


6
When the class was asked to list their talents
Sly put down adjusting.
There’s nowhere I can’t adjust. 

Yeah, Gaelinda had to laugh,
Nowhere, honey,
laughing her fuck you laugh.

And when Dwayne confessed to how much
he liked being runner
for the Infirmary, maybe he’d study
to be a nurse,
his voice suddenly boyish, serious
like a kid’s when he’s talking about baseball
and playing in the majors someday,
Gaelinda called over to him, Homeboy
I know you too well,
I know you from the streets.
Today she wasn’t going to let him be anything
but an inmate.
I’m good at fucking men over,
put that down on your list. Don’t matter
where I am,
I do my dance.

When she was leaving, she balled up
the assignment,
she made many sharp edges to it,
many flat surfaces buckling on each other.
The paper almost barked.
It was a small pack of dogs in my hand.
You think I got room for this shit in my cell?

Afterward, I stroked the wrinkles out.
She’d signed her name in flowery spiralings
and swirls and over the i
there was a small heart
and under the column Obstacles
to Developing Your Talents
in lovely looping capitals
she’d written NONE.


7
Is this all we are to you — fuck-ups,
dope fiends, pimps,
a few murderers? funny stories
to tell at a cocktail party? “Why just today
I was chatting with my friend,
the baby raper”? Just who
are you going to show these poems to, these
mind games?
The Warden? the shrink?

Was this what the rest of his life
would be like?
Stephen demanded to know. In a room
just big enough for a table, a broken,
upright piano,
a stack of 1944 Unitarian hymnbooks,
to sob to a lame group like this,
to an even lamer volunteer,
a teacher who’ll make a joke out of him later
to impress colleagues, co-eds.


8
My college students are writing in favor
of longer sentences, capital punishment.
It’s not fair they say, turning
from a film on child abuse. It’s justice
they want. For the two prim girls
at the shelter,
the baby whose mother held it
over a bridge railing,
the tiny one who had to be freed from
her mother’s tight grip.
And justice too for the boy
who came home to find his Dad
on the back porch
hanging by his neck?
who tried with a kitchen knife to saw
his father down,
who threw it at the neighbors
when they tried to lead him away? Justice
for this young man
in jail now for a string of burglaries?
And justice for that old machinist,
Mr. Mac, whose cough is a rusty blade
driven so deep into his body
he leans over as if stabbed? Two months ago
he killed a child,
the car leaped the curb
as if someone had wrenched the wheel
from his hands.
He told me he’d been drunk.
Can’t you imagine how he must have felt,
this seventy-two-year-old man
who’d never missed a day of work,
facing one to five now, mandatory?
No, my students answer,
no, they’ve never done anything that wrong,
nothing a criminal might do. A man
ought to be made to pay
for what he’s done, he ought to be
made to pay.


9
It’s not fair. That’s what I hear in jail too,
My class here wants justice also,
by which they don’t mean they’re innocent
of all charges against them
but only that life’s been punishing them
for something more
than what they did with a knife or gun,
what they started to walk out of a store with.


10
Michael tried to explain his mistake
as he called it, how once he’d begun
he had to keep stabbing.
As he talked, the guards came closer
as if they could tell from the little trembling
of his hand, his head’s tilt,
his voice rising to a harsh, thin whisper,
that he was about to start something
only they could stop.
Why did I have to make things difficult
for him — a counselor
who didn’t even come in with Jesus,
only paper, pencil.
At least at home Mike could run away,
climb his railroad bridge and sit for hours
with hundreds of feet of air between him
and his stepfather, planning
what to say to keep the bastard’s hands off.
What do I want from him?
Why have I given him this old watch,
Do you think I have to worry about time here?
It matters if I’m late? 
Lifting its little coolness to his cheek,
its scratched bubble face,
he told me about his first watch,
the one he’d taken from his stepfather’s bureau
as the man slept — 
the first thing he’d ever stolen — 
and he’d climbed the railroad bridge
and not till the top had he slipped it on.
Maybe he’d never go home,
maybe he’d stay high up there, sleeping
with the winds
and the ghosts of the trains. The watch’s face
had glowed
and he’d cupped his hands around it,
squinted till there were tiny sparks
radiating out.


11
Maybe Stephen’s right,
when he told me the Warden let me
come in here
to teach my course, to tutor,
to put out the inmate newspaper
just so he could look liberal, his jail progressive.
Don’t I dress carefully
so the guards will know to let me out
one iron gate,
then another, then a third?
Each time I leave, I wonder if I haven’t gone
into this jail
just so I can walk out of it,
whistling into a cool October, so much
sudden bright air,
all these open spaces welcoming me,
offering me no resistance.


12
Finally even Heavy agreed
to read aloud, today,
this quiet, 280-lb passer of bad checks,
his bold graceful handwriting
and the silk bandana he washes out
each night
his only flourishes allowed here.
Tomorrow he was getting out.
What if he fucked things up again?
What could he find to talk about
with his sons?
He wanted to bring home each a toy
just like a normal father
returning from a business trip.
His voice kept falling in mid-sentence
and I had to keep encouraging him
to speak up,
and once I saw Bobby D.’s lips moving
as if someone had to finish
his homeboy’s words;
we were all leaning forward, Sly,
Dwayne, Lorenzo, Stephen, Will, old Mr. Mac,
Baby Mike, Eddie, Annette,
Boom-Boom, Mary Ellen, even Gaelinda,
even the Ice Man, Jesse — 
as if with each person’s turn to read
we were standing at a door
slightly ajar, trying to follow the light
all the way in
as far back as possible, and then imagining
everything else
that was left in the shadows.


13
Out of sight of the prison
I pull off the road, open my notebook
and am writing
my face so close to the words
I might be arguing with them, whispering.
Looking up from the page just now
I almost expected to find myself back in jail
but when I gazed into the rearview mirror
I saw only my face, tinged yellow
and gaunt, the forehead unpardonably stupid.
How could the love I’d felt
just a few minutes ago
not still show? Listening so intently
hadn’t I too been transformed?
I’d thought surely
I’d have been able to bear this grace
past the first light, the next,
carry it into any traffic.

— November 1987

You can read all of Bursk’s work from The Sun here. (Subscribers have unlimited access to our complete archive. Sign in to get started.)