Tag: Gary Fincke

Now, Morning by Gary Fincke

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Now, Morning

Among a thousand tourists, three-deep
And more along the shore of Key West,
We watch the winter sun perform, setting
At the advertised time while someone
Plays Amazing Grace on bagpipes,
Plaintive for a few dollars and change.
Those closest surround us within such
Solemnity that my wife says the bagpipes
Are wailing Taps as if the sun were
A flag being lowered like a coffin.

Just now, eyes forward, everyone agrees
Upon the vanishing point, applauding
As if, without our acknowledged awe,
The sun will refuse tomorrow, dissolving
Us with darkness in this low-lying place
That the brochure says is paradise,
The sky clear, the water, in the direction
We are facing, appearing endless.

*

Gary Fincke’s latest collection is The Necessary Going On: Selected Poems 1980-2025 (Press 53, 2025). His most recent collection of new poems is For Now, We Have Been Spared (Slant Books, 2025).

ONE ART’s 2025 Best Spiritual Literature Nominations

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ONE ART’s 2025 Best Spiritual Literature Nominations

tc Wiggins – Like Lightning  

Moudi Sbeity – All Things Bloom  

James Diaz – I will not go to Darkness having known Nothing of the Light

Naila Francis – For my friend weeping at the coffee shop  

James Feichthaler – So Much Baggage  

Gary Fincke – The Far North

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The annual Best Spiritual Literature awards are hosted by Orison Books.

“Orison Books publishes Best Spiritual Literature (formerly The Orison Anthology) every year, a collection of the best spiritual writing in all genres published in periodicals in the preceding year. […] Editors of literary periodicals (print or digital) may nominate work in a single genre or in multiple genres to be considered for inclusion in our annual anthology, Best Spiritual Literature, which will reprint the finest spiritually engaged writing from a broad and inclusive range of perspectives.”

Saving Face by Gary Fincke

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Saving Face

After I park, after I step out and close
my door behind me, I make certain not
to look back where my father, past eighty,
pushes off with his arms, gritting his teeth
through bone-on-bone contact in his knees.

For years, each day has welcomed him
by repeating its orders to limp and wheeze.
Dutiful, I have learned to walk slowly
and slightly ahead, an arrangement
that seeks to blind and deafen me.

Nearly overhead, trucks groan through
the upward curve to the express lanes
to Pittsburgh. The field he wants me to see
has lost thirty yards to a knot of overpass,
one end zone forested by stanchions.

Now, the century fresh, my father says
semi-pro meant being paid, game by game,
according to gate receipts, that he knew,
as they huddled, whether he was earning
as much as his baker’s-assistant wage.

All of us, he says, would have played
for nothing, dishing it out and taking it
on a surface baked so hard that grass
was a memory. So unforgiving, he says.
It taught you what a ballgame could be.

The beer garden we passed, he says,
that’s where my coach, Fats Skertich,
was shot and killed after an insult over
a baseball bet unpaid. The welsher that
Fats slapped left and returned with a gun.

My father has me lay hands upon the earth
between the ghosts of sidelines, test
the resilience of the soil with my shoes.
That fellow, he says, had time to think,
and still he shot, then lapses into silence

that lasts the field’s width as if we need
to reach the opponent’s sideline before
he adds, “Some, you should know, took
the shooter’s side. Then the war began,
swallowed most of us, and ended it.”

*

Gary Fincke’s latest collection is The Necessary Going On: Selected Poems 1980-2025
(Press 53, 2025). His most recent collection of new poems is For Now, We Have Been
Spared (Slant Books, 2025).

Two Poems by Gary Fincke

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The Far North

In this climate, there is always
consequence from exposing
even the smallest part of yourself
to a moment of common weather.
This far north, without a shadow
for half a life, there’s reassurance
in its length extending, at last,
like a brief compass. There are days
when we say, “The whisper of stars,”
naming the tinkling crash-landing
of our spoken words that freeze and fall,
the surprise of the unexpected beauty
of terrible cold. Though, at this latitude,
tragedy is inevitable, such slender grace
of the ordinary can still be earned through
endurance, a bright, fluttering peace
that settles warily upon a branch,
so close just breathing startles it away

*

Word for Word

My wife, today, says she is not as sharp
As last year or even a week ago,
And I agree, claiming kinship to keep
Her company on this steep, soft downslope,
More candid than I was with my father,
Who I hear every time I speak, sometimes
Belligerent with refusal to change.

How we dissolve into inheritance,
Seeing its unmistakable imprint.
A lifetime friend now looks exactly like
His father as he sank through dementia.
Last week, at our 60th reunion,
Only one woman came alone, bringing
A dog for her comfort, a Retriever
As well trained as any of us despite,
I’m certain, becoming more bored as she
Repeated her tale of acquisition.

Word for word, she spoke it to each couple,
Even the pace identical when she
Story-told again to me and my wife,
The way my father, one day, recited
The Gettysburg Address, trying to match
The reported speed of Lincoln. Always,
He ended within five or six seconds,
And then readied himself again, telling
Me to say GO, serious, at ninety,
Sitting in his blue chair with the worn-through
Arm rests, a green pillow stuffed behind him.

Outside, the neighbor with seven children
Yelled the same blasphemy at all of them,
Her husband two years dead, the oldest boy
Smoking, the youngest still in diapers,
My father, nearly deaf, rocking himself
To prepare to stand, failing, then rocking
Again, while I sat and concentrated
Upon keeping my arms mute at my side.

*

Gary Fincke’s newest collection of poetry For Now, We Have Been Spared, will be published by Slant Books in the Spring of 2025. A “Selected Poems,” taken from fourteen collections, will be published in 2025 by Press 53.

Two Poems by Gary Fincke

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The Exact Likeness for Grief

Swinging a pitching wedge, my father lofts
Seven golf balls over my mother’s grave.
To spare the grass, he hits from the shoulder,
Picking them clean from the thin lie of dirt.

It’s forty yards, I’m guessing, to the woods
Where all but one of seven disappear
In yardage he can manage, length to spare,
At eighty-eight, his knees beyond repair.

He limps to her grave site, his love an arc
That ends among trees. The flowers he’s picked
Follow him in my hands; he turns the club
Upside down and uses it as a cane.

“Some day you’ll know,” my father says, meaning
His knees, and then again, “Some day you’ll know,”
Meaning, this time, the grave, this selection
Of flowers, orange ones I cannot name.

My father, the prophet, bends to the vase
Of wilted stems. My father, who’s warned me,
“You’ll see” a thousand times, lifts the fresh buds
From my hands, steadies himself on my arm.

My father, who was a maintenance man,
Sends the old stems to the woods in my hands,
Seats the flowers by height like a teacher
While I kick the short ball into the trees.

*

Peace, a Flightless Bird

Algorithms are sending me ads
for cremation services, ones that
save money through pre-need purchase.

The world gives daily birth to flags;
They shriek their certainties
In foster homes they will grow to burn.

All myths have become biographies.
Every war is undeclared.
Even our secrets are undeserved.

Peace, a flightless bird, is extinct, war
So ordinary we show up for work
Like soldiers, our anger expected.

In the museum of memory
We inspect the webbed footprints
Sunk so far into the earth

We nearly remember the shape
Of a bird so large it must have
Believed there was nothing it need fear.

*

Gary Fincke’s poetry collections have been published by Arkansas, Ohio State, Michigan State, Lynx House, BkMk, and Jacar. His newest collection For Now, We Have Been Spared will be published by Slant Books late this year.

Two Poems by Gary Fincke

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Blueprints

Yesterday, my sister begged me to box
and keep thousands of photographs
and souvenirs she had hauled home
from our father’s house after he died.
It’s been fourteen years, time enough
that her husband has also succumbed,
prompting her to gather and stack
a half-room of dried memorabilia
as if preparing to set fire to the past.

She hovers, leans closer when I pause.
Our father is in very few photographs,
our mother barely there. None are from
the century in which we are living.
What you don’t take, gets pitched,
my sister says, and despite dust
and asthma, I keep looking. Which
of these would be irreplaceable? Which
would I risk myself to save from fire?

A neighbor, after her house was leveled
by fire, had it rebuilt exactly as it was before,
cloned from photographs and blueprints
that survived in a fireproof, padlocked box.
This afternoon, her house has been filled
with furniture matched by memory.
Her elderly mother, that neighbor says,
is comforted by the television,

its familiar faces and voices
visiting each day at the same time.
When alone, I rummage through family
photographs as if they were exotic
playing cards to be used for solitaire,
arranging until every person ages
from bottom to top, a fortunate stack
of spades or clubs, diamonds, hearts.

*

The Job Icons

On their first birthdays, babies of the Thais of Vietnam choose their vocations
by grasping, from among many choices, a symbol of that work.

All those objects look like toys—a push broom,
A plow, stacked books and an intricate wrench.
These parents, right now, recall boys who picked
Product samples, insurance policies,
A miniature, unreadable lease.
They worry about the icon artist,
What intentions he might have captured while
Shaping for eyes so close to the carpet.
He’s formed blackboards and pulpits, small scalpels
With edges rounded for safety, but there,
Beside them, are the beautiful logos
Of the service industry, a soldier,
The telephone for a million cold calls.

After all that wishing, there’s no telling
What a baby, unguided, will crawl to.
For example, all three of my children
Plunged both hands into their first birthday cakes,
But only two of them smeared their faces
And flung their filthy hands into their hair.
The youngest threw his high and cried, afraid
Of crumbs or terrified at the swift change
In his fingers, how something like disease
Was sticking to him. Chocolate, we said,
Sugar, delicious, making the gestures
Of licking and sucking, babies ourselves,
Although nothing we did could quiet him
As he held them up like a prisoner.

*

Gary Fincke’s poetry collections have been published by Ohio State, Michigan State, Arkansas, Jacar, and Serving House. His next collection For Now, We Have Been Spared will be published by Slant Books late this year.

The Trip to Bountiful by Gary Fincke

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The Trip to Bountiful

“When you’ve lived longer than your house and family,
you’ve lived long enough.”
          – Carrie Watts

For her last visit, my mother
arrived by bus. Conversation
was penance. Apology a charm.
The VCR worked a miracle
that fed the afternoon.
Downstairs, the weather
headed north, the house
six months old, surrounded
by infant shrubbery
and small, vulnerable trees.
Geraldine Page has died,
my mother said while
sorrow and wistfulness
settled in even before
the house in Bountiful
loomed catastrophic with loss.
My mother, throughout,
concentrated as if she had
fallen in love with longing
for the impossible.
And I, become companion,
allowed her, with rewind
and pause, to absorb
the expressive face
of a woman who wanted
nothing more than altering
the foreseeable future.
In the near dark, I allowed
the unspooling of credits,
extending her privacy
all the way to copyright
in what I believed was
generosity grand enough
to be labeled love.
Then we sat together as
empathy embraced us
like a shy, new arrival
until my mother settled
into her silence, the one
with rhythm so familiar
it was performed with no
accompanist but memory.

*

Gary Fincke’s collections of poetry have been published by Arkansas, Ohio State, Michigan State, BkMk, Lynx House, Jacar, and Serving House. His next collection, For Now, We Have Been Spared, will be published by Slant Books in 2024.

What the Doctor Said, What I Answered by Gary Fincke

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What the Doctor Said, What I Answered

Yesterday, when asked to number my pain
from one to ten, I’d said seven, maybe,
or six, although nothing but ten would have
driven me twelve miles to expose myself.
How privacy is ceded to rescue,
and yet, even now, my C-Scan upon
the specialist’s screen, I remain stubborn
in dishonesty, my panic the white
of all colors for fear. This close to oncology,
I hear myself form “I understand,” beginning
to accept like the fool who waives his rights,
and though that doctor insists I might walk
away intact, I can’t shut myself up.
No matter what she qualifies, I talk
and talk, thinking I’ll get to it, this thing
I am working up to, how the slender grace
of benign can still be earned through
biopsy, its bright, fluttering peace
settling warily upon a branch, so close
just breathing sometimes startles it away.

*

Gary Fincke’s collections of poems have been published by Ohio State, Michigan State, Arkansas, BkMk, Lynx House, Jacar, and Serving House.

The Day Your Father Dies by Gary Fincke

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The Day Your Father Dies

Three time zones east, while you sleep
in your travel-vouchered hotel suite,
the ambulance, pulsing red, but mute,
arrives for your father. Your sister,
discreet, waits for what she believes
is a decent hour, her morning nearly
ended before she places her call.

Because you mark this moment,
you will always know that the first
of six job-candidate interviews,
right then, is eight minutes away.
While you fix on absence, your colleague
carries three morning conversations;
you make phone calls during lunch.

When, during the afternoon, you begin
to season your questions with banter,
the candidates are quick to smile.
Your rooms are swept and scoured while
you overhear strangers toast each other
before dinner in an expensive restaurant
so close you can walk there, then back

to where the hours, their voices hushed,
reuse their condolences throughout
your all-night sleeplessness. A plane
taxis to its gate with no plans but waiting
for you to board just after sunrise, exiting,
then entering two versions of winter, light
about to be altered by accumulated snow.

*

Gary Fincke’s collections have won what is now the Wheeler Prize (Ohio State) and the Wheelbarrow Books Prize (Michigan State). His latest collection, The Mussolini Diaries was published by Serving House in 2020.

Union Work by Gary Fincke

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Union Work

Get lost somewhere, the supervisor said,
and I didn’t question because summer
was nearly over, that week and one more
before I would return to the college
where I was addicted to being lost.
I walked on the public path where tourists,
some afternoons, huddled while college girls
whose fathers held white collar jobs explained
what was happening in sterilizing
and packaging before escorting them
to a shop that featured plastic pickles,
cartoon ketchup bottles, and hard-cover
pictorial histories of Heinz that
praised baked beans, spaghetti, and a long list
of condensed, canned soups. The locker room, when
I reached it, was deserted, a shift change
hours away. I found a newspaper
and sat against a wall to read about
the Pirates and the racial unrest that
had blossomed again in cities, Newark
lately, Detroit, Cleveland, and Baltimore.
I felt like a thief earning two dollars
and fifty cents for an hour of lost,
a job whose one demand was hiding shame.
I might as well have been cutting one more
calculus class in order to avoid
the simple task of humiliation,
watching my roommate dress and leave before
I rose to get lost where nothing was done
but following the progress of shadows
while I mastered what I already knew.
For small pleasure, I chose an exact time
to stand and go, timing my travel back
to research. Though that clock, like calculus,
didn’t care what I did, advancing while
I wasn’t thankful for the privilege
of union wage for being lost, even
those minutes, walking slowly, to return.

*

Gary Fincke’s latest collections of poetry are The Infinity Room, which won the Wheelbarrow Books Pize (Michigan State, 2019) and The Mussolini Diaries (Serving House, 2020). Other collections of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction have won the Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction (Georgia), what is now the Wheeler Poetry Prize (Ohio State), and the Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Nonfiction (Pleaides Press).