Featured Poet...

Steve Mueske


Sunday Afternoon Dialectic

I wrote:
The hawk in the blue loft, circling.

I wrote:
The hawk lofted in blue, circling.

I wrote:
The hawk circling in the blue loft.

While around me I heard the machinery
of birds — what, trilling? — from their green enclave.

And I lay back and heard them: the crickets
trilling as if about to burst from their crusty shells

and thought of Kunitz and the old willow
beating on the window pane. I looked up to see

the hawk in a throw of blue sky—wings trembling
on a tide of air, circle tighter and tighter,

black eyes scanning. I watched for the head to lock
and the wings to fold in that momentary pause

before the strike of lightning.

The Swimmer

Air pools with the sound of water.

Under undulating light a figure
sluices arm over head, hand

cupped, pulling
for tighter form, a few seconds shaved.

It is the rhythm
of breath and swing, body

arrowing edge to edge, against time.
Against weight. Not the self

dreaming, not
the somnambulist's feel for wall, or

the day returning, eyeless, lidless
as ghost fish in the greater deep.

It is the act of becoming
myth. The drawn breath, face pressed

to water. The arm lifting,
water arcing in release. Now, the ease

of slipping into the turn, the push
and kick toward surface

where light waits. Toward hands held
open, the burst of welcome.

The Dream of the Burning City

Great sheets of fire danced down the streets,
a parade of heat
seeking the inner chambers, where we could be found

hiding. We did all we could to escape,
but there would be no more running
from the veil of undoing. Tokens,

to be sure, we freed the small birds
of affection kept in cool basements,
carefully tended by loss.

This Far in August

    Are wildflowers holy? Are weeds?
        There's infinite hope
    if both are, but perhaps not for us.

                   —Stephen Dunn

i.)

By now the bull thistles
have become legends

        of defense, claiming
space among the wild daisies,
larkspur and mustard
    by the simple
untouchable violence of form.

    They tower over
their neighbors, guarding    
their weedy plots
    with a sense of drama.

Every wild weed sees this
and knows, they, too,
        have put down roots;
they, too, have a stake in artifice.

ii.)

Summer has crossed
its apex, every living thing
logy with heat and sunlight.

Smartweeds cling to fences,
gangs of leafy spurge
spread over the hills,
        and violets, those
lovely muses, sing whenever
            the wind shifts.

Every wild weed
has provided for itself
beyond the pale
            of spray or blade.

        Every wild weed
believes it has only one season,
    one season only.

iii.)

        The Karner Blue butterfly,
so near extinction, does not care
    about the strength
of muscled stalk and toothy leaves.

It knows only the pang
        of hunger and the freedom
of a new season with wings.

        The humid air
swaddles flower and butterfly.
Within days the purple whitens

with seed. Wind blows them
to neighborhoods
    where they are not wanted,
    but where some will,   
        despite the odds,      survive.

Why These Poplars are Crying

As a child he'd dream of wild horses    
whinnying in the sky. He could feel the rough leather
of their reins in his hands, his godlike shoulders

gilded in sun. When news of his death
spread through the world, pilgrims came to say goodbye.
The daughters of the sun stood among them,

radiant, rooted in grief, their wind-sprung leaves
drifting toward a river no one would remember
were it not for the light trembling in the trees.

At Roughlock Falls

Here where water meets water
tumbling down
from the moss-covered heights
is a pool of shadows and
a blue arc smashed into mist.
Sunlight swathes the nurled orange walls
greened with lichen. Tree
and plant roots dangle from earth's-edge
in tangled braids, like witches' hair,
roots of alien vegetables, strange
eroded scalp. The sound
is a susurrous roar
of making and unmaking, the earth
having long ago lost
its fingerhold on soil over bedrock
washed downstream. It is
a quiet way, this way
of water following the ancient
earth-pull of water to water,
however many miles: dodges
through trees, arterial races
over plains, the free-form ballet
over curved and swollen lips
wherever rocks wait below
on the river's progress to the Gulf.
It is a quiet way, this way
of water—until, tumbling
down from the greenish heights,
it is broken and remade,
in perpetuity
shouting: hush.

The Ghost Town at Tinton

Black angus low to the dark hills
where men once slogged home from the mine
grimed with dirt and gold, loaded
with stories from twelve hours
in the hole. It is cooler now,
the sun a burnished orange over the berm.
Their bellows shiver down spearfish canyon.
Dark as shadows they wend
dirt paths between arthritic homes
kneeling in the grass, past
the old Ford rusting on a rise
flecked with mica, past
the post office and dance hall ruins
at main street’s end, straddling
two states. Though the gold is gone,
the ground gives up tantalite ore
for missiles and consumer electronics,
metal that resists corrosion. Nights
like this, when all is still, sounds can carry
for miles. Voices from a radio left on
on the top of a ridge can travel
through trees, too indistinct for love
or loss, and sift like ghostly fingers
through rotting walls where newspapers
fifty years old were once stuffed
to keep out the chill.

Where Nothing Grows

    [1]

The parking lot is strewn
with the wreckage
of pumpkins, burned wood

and glass, the air
a mizzling white a-blur
with the wings of doves

fighting for pulp and mash.
If I believed in signs, I’d say
this promises to be a day of need.

I move through the hours
with an eye to the glass, watching
cars scuttle by on the freeway

lambent in headlights.
The office windows tick
with sleet. Heat kicks on

while my cursor blinks –
onoff onoff – as though stunned.
I watch workers wilt

on the bus home, their heads
sagging in the harsh light
like poisoned dandelions.


    [2]

There wasn’t always this evenness
of middling light, or cold air with its brace

of winter coming. Just yesterday
there were wraiths bluing the soft lips

of wild night gardens. Woods brimmed
with strange music and slow fires, ecstacy.

There was always time – so much time –
for birth and rebirth, for the bees

to hum in the orchards, drowsy
with sweet-rot and sun; always time

to hold the sky by its drawstring
while clouds drifted over green fields

swallowed in slow-moving shadows;
time to build and destroy

and rebuild again just for the sheer joy
of being the demiurge. No one

believed in the death of faith, or
an end, much less the long death beyond.


    [3]

The body has been at war with itself
since the first separation:
from Mother, with a lusty

yowl in the bright-lit cold
of a new room; from Spirit,
gloved in a raiment of skin.

It calls to itself in strange tongues,
says enemy, says other
and walks in the rubble

carrying the war dead, the
children charred in their play clothes.
It reaches into the dust

for the jawbone of an ass, angered
at the right hand, the hipbone
and the eye. It has known

a beginning it cannot remember,
and will know an end
it cannot see, days filled

with calumny, enmity, hands
clutching rocks, eyes lifted
skyward for the first signs of rapture.


    [4]

But where is heaven? In a hollowed
pomegranate, bubbling

on a spoon? Secreted, perhaps,
in a lacquered box with gold filigree.

A kept mistress. A new loft
built in the scooped-out belly

of the old river mill. Even now,
in the year of cranes, the tower cranes

are lined up, jibs pointing past
mounded dirt piebald with snow.

And there is a fence, always a fence,
separating the new from the old.

And here, where the theater will be,
there is one also. On one side, lighted

signs and the concrete blocks that daily
rise like castle walls out of the ashes

of time. On the other, the lot
where the homeless drink, flushed

from the woods by cold
and a clear view of retreat.

Some mornings only refuse remains,
a garbage can dragged

from the park, blackened
by fire. Smashed glass, frost-covered

and yellowed by lamps, twinkling
like stars in the hard-packed snow.

It makes me wonder if time does not
exist, as a mystic once suggested.

Maybe there are only small and grand
dramas, with their seeds of conflict.


    [5]

Winter, with its top-down lock
on dimension, its
insistence on black-and-white,
is a time of consideration, of cold
felt as a slowing of blood, the blood
pulling back into the fact
of itself, circular
as the earth’s currents
in the slip of rotation, powered
by the same engine
that makes two four, forms
the heart and lungs, and stars
out of gaseous clouds.

In the beginning was the Word,
and the word was a name
and the name held the thing,
as saucer does its infinite home
for cup. But what are things, exactly,
when all is translated, inverted,
traveling as signals into
the brain, some Mind, not
as things-in-themselves
but things-as-they-are-perceived?
What would it mean to doubt,
except, on the level of sign?


    [6]   

A blood-red cardinal descends,
wings outspread before a brilliant scrim

of snow. In the next moment
he will land and take what he needs, driven

by hunger and a gift of seeds.
For now I am content to leave him

in the air, a-blur:
a suggestion of coming–

Steve Mueske holds an MFA in Writing from Hamline University and has published poems recently in The Massachusetts Review, Water-Stone, The American Poetry Journal, Northeast Review, 88, Fulcrum and others, in several anthologies, including Best New Poets 2005.  His first full-length collection, A Mnemonic For Desire, will be released February 2006 by Ghost Road Press.  He lives in the Midwest, where he edits three candles journal and manages three candles press.  He can be reached at steve.mueske@gmail.com