Vic Burkhammer

Vic Burkhammer

Vic Burkhammer is a poet who has worked as a car washer, hotel clerk, roofer, construction worker, encyclopedia salesman, hospital supply clerk, bartender, teacher, librarian and newspaper copy editor. He has been the news editor of The Charleston Gazette since 1989. He lives in South Charleston, W.Va., with his wife Nancy and four cats.

January Day at Cheat Lake

I am alone, looking at ice break up around the
edges. Small clouds float like ideas and with them I
could climb into the sky. The sycamore trees pull me
back like good lines of poetry that bring me deeper
into myself. I see a few leaves hanging on, leaf
children who struggle all day trying to leave the house
where they grew up. I think of the grief my father held
inside after the war, his feelings that seemed too
buried for language. The rock I sit on says things I
can't lift without help. Then a blown branch scratches
across the ice, and I get a feeling that is an old
farmer whose face is brown and pitted, sitting in a
rocking chair on his back porch, rubbing his hands
together and saying nothing.

Looking for Something Fresh

Walking to work,
I am a walnut.
I feel a husk around me:
it is yesterday happening again.

35 years
a prose poem of gratitude for my father

Let me put us back at Spruce Knob Lake, W.Va., 1962, trout fishing,
you, brother Dana and I one clear, cold Spring morning. The nearest
town an hour away. Let me reassemble the mist rising off the water and
us casting over and over, finally catching just one. I hope you
remember this the way I do. JFK was still alive, but he had nothing on
us. It's a long drive up there we will probably never make together
again. But every year, more often really, especially around this time,
I think back, and somehow I'd like to see you again, but I go on
living.

Slipping away

For Nancy on her birthday

Not just Hiroshima Day; it's your birthday again.
No wonder you don't like even the Mississippi blues.
Always your laughter bruises even the toughest times.

Maybe, it's because you know this life is like Machado says,
"Beside the broad ocean, flowers.../In my honeycomb of bees,
There are tiny grains of salt."

No wonder you always thought Aristotle's cartharsis was just bull.
Each day, you see South Charleston, W.Va., slipping away.

Today, sun or rain, I can't tell anything about the weather.
Still, I wish you all the right direction,
And from these hands full of nothing, here, have some hope.
Leave some kind of steel here with me, leave your worries.

Is it true that Truman, on hearing about the bomb, said nothing,
Then went into the next room and played the Missouri Waltz?

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