Steve Mueske: Poetry

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.

A Short History of Things
Not Quite Themselves

In fall, the dogwood remembers
the former fullness of itself-with-blossoms,
the way a rag, once a favored shirt,
lingers for the body, the way
a bra misses its unscarred mistress,
hangs now on a hook in the dark,
where the ties used to be. Sometimes
things just aren't right —
are caught in a power outage, left
unattended or broken. It's not
always a matter of fault.
The silence is not silent.
Under the soft layers of dust
is more dust, then the idea of dust
in that tenuous layer between table
and air. Hear that? No, not
the keening of the vagabond
whose one song has the power
to raise the dead. The other:
trapdoors, unhinged and screwless,
flapping in changeable weather.
They are testifying like true apostles
to all who will hear: It's me. Me, goddamnit.

The Monster, on Living

Perhaps it is
because lightning once tricked its blue fingers
along my spine, and called me

out of nothing
with a ghostly imperative. Perhaps it is
the itch of skin that is and is not

mine. A stranger to this life,
I am learning to read the iconography
of green. Sleepless, I move

through shadows, a master of solitude
and little else but the moveless and wide dark
from which doubt wells.

Why do these borrowed eyes see, these
cold fingers touch
the nascent heads of supplicants reaching

toward sun-shot sky?
It can't be love — for what do I know of it?
And not memory,

for I have none. Why this desire then,
this trembling to hold and to name?
And what is this anxiety

that hums in the root of all things,
that I should be afraid
to lose what I do not yet comprehend?

On Desire

If I could burst into bloom, red
with the rose of it, with the rise and swell
of it, called into being through
the deep green, and trembling with light,
I might understand. If I knew
how light touches water
with a tracery of trees, gifts
the world as it is not, I might know
why I am not a rose or water or light
but a man who suddenly believes
in witchcraft. What else
but this hollowing fire, this mark
of the thaumaturge, could make
the wild heart, so like a bird, thrash
in its cage? Imagine rain and wind,
portrait of tempest with shed: shivering
slivers of wood, the whole structure
in danger of imploding. Here under
a black sky swirling with clouds
I am ready to be unmade. The air
is charged and blue, and my hands
are burning with light.

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.

Game Day

The blue doors open.
The room fills with contrails.

Leaping, fish
forget their names, at the apex believe
in the arc of flight. Mountains
slowly pace along the sidelines, their beautiful jaws clenched
          in anticipation.

The engines are at home this time.
Everyone is buzzing. The woods wag their fingers
          of praise, speak
in the tongues of wind and seeds.

It is another day of light
carting its little wagon of tears over crushed glass.

Another day of flowers
staring at their jagged reflections.

          At dusk
the girl made of wood
becomes light and smoke, heat
uncoiling
with whispers and whorls
in the deep cul-de-sacs, in the heartwood,
where the god of ash whistles.

The black doors close.

A fox watches from wood's-edge, eyes flashing
          with caution.

Clouds unfold their dark hands,
present an audience of lights.

          Tomorrow,
the engines travel, so tonight
they are thrumming
under the hoods of sleep.

The Shrike in the Garden of Machinery

i.)
A lesser god in the kingdom of thorns,
I carried Eve out of storage
one sleepless night, plucked her eyes
from their case, oiled her rusty joints.
By lamplight, I planned to remake her
from memory, a goddess before good and evil,
the original Conversation. All that.

I blew the dust from her hair,
set the torsion of her fingers,
wound the key in her back. Why?
To watch her mouth bloom. So I could,
as a drunken bee, buzz at her lips.
I wanted her to speak to me, undress
with conviction. But she was dead. Folded
into the book of days like a flyer for happiness.

ii.)

Isn't this is the way of things? Clematis flowers
sprouting and rotting on the same angry vine. The one thing
you can't have centered in your mind, a splinter.

The clot of traffic, those in the city drowning
on sidewalks. The improvisation of ventricles,
dilated pupils. Hours dreaming the perfect Thing.

Portrait of man leaning toward window.
Man waiting for bus. Man wedged in slices of bread.
A refrain: one day the next day the day before …

It won't be long before the hatchling pecks
through the skin of that building, and that, emerging
wet and weak-necked, sport for a new breed of man.

And still there is the hunt for the Fruit.
The blood of erasure. The Serpent's belly rasping
on steamy roadside grates. Do you know, yet,

the price of knowledge? There in the center of it all,
the spike, the compass lined with bodies.

iii.)

Listen. There are three ways to speak.
One involves hiding in the weeds, covered

with stories. Though you may be tempted to,
don't call me Adam. I've never been here before.

I come out of the redness of earth.
My eyes are on fire.

The solid weight of the Pomegranate is a real thing.
Everything else is a mnemonic for desire.

"more furious selves"

more fire than water or
when water rising

into atmosphere, into shape-
shifting fields of gray

a bomb
with a questionable detonator

sensitive to light, to
vibration, to

the slightest change
in pressure     the sound

of photosynthetic processes, the
multifarious prayers

of leaves unfolding, binary
states of bioluminescence —

night's ignition —
attraction, all the matters

of scale (as of)
the stem's fibrous ladder,

electrons' higher-order
escape from idea

and all these     and all these
repetitions, the ocean's mere

groping for shore, a pattern
of dissembling

the moon beyond this
mountain, this volcano, this

search for what is
fuel for the second stage,

the itch of ignition,
fire pushing

the pistons      the whole
machine lurching

out of stasis, the
latticework of capillaries

filling the wide
iris

So Much of X is Y

and I'm careless of the wind blowing
through the holes in my body, low whistle

of subterranean congress, fore-lit train
rising into a day buttered with promise. Careless

of infatuations with neon, wolf-hour
visions of the fifth angel polishing its trumpet

on the eve of destruction; the whip-tag tryst
of nerve and brain. Those things.

I am on fire, writing letters to the dead,
swallowing swords — anything to appease

the inventor of sorrow. Tomorrow
is a game of euchre with the ghost of midnight,

and I'm an odds-on favorite for resurrection.
Who knew it would feel this good

to run nude through butterflies?
The wind is filled with music,

a verse and chorus of birds, a trumpeting
of orange-flowered vine climbing lattice.

I'm watching the sky while ants march for shelter,
this itch the nose-burn of ozone,

curl of dog-lip and black tulips, careless
of skirling sirens. I've been here in dreams,

at the intersection of store-back and alley,
plastic and alloy, sweet tincture of key and chord.

This is where the song forms, rising out of nothing,
with little more than a few ideas about itself.