Community Still
What can the Lords of Everything
about dull eccentricity complain?
A fine shill, which is to see kirtle
cock-eyed and expect its rounding up,
would cheer, would meet the sun.
And then at sacred hoops the banners
stream, and yet no historian
writes with finish the broken
horizon, and these Prodigals replay
their Herculean task unnoticed,
while grownups pass and joggle,
sniff and blow and jo, and shuffle, prattling feet.
Witness, at cost, the skipping girl:
She finds in a book honors
of wet cheeks and high ploys to relief
in bouncing from flue to pratfall; silvers
schooldays yet in stern lessons, polymath craze.
Or coal-boy, rougher than the dirty feathers
of his temperatures, dreams a leaf
and glimmers churlish in the post-tomtom clear.
That even nothing canters tail-flare
let the shorter race befall, and busy logs
go dancing with their dogs,
and frowning cats, the gentle rats — Dear Blood
it’s genius-wondered is homely bog.
Dear luscious acorns lie in palming
the store, and gorgeous rooms, they say,
land block next door where progress
beggars progress freely as storms.
Is that the pipe worth loving?
Is it in eagerness to puff and strike?
Some seek in timely knot,
in small, warmed, grass-built plot,
their sustenance of hoo-re-lay.
Some play the quince and are unshackled.
Some are the battle-flocked.
Still others, or all, with wampum
stay, call it quit-leave, and it
spurns and streaks against this sky;
and election is quick, it is empty and bruised,
and then you shall find the outside
of bursting, seeking Queen of Part-Day,
first in a dawn, first in winding down away.
It Was Raining in the Cathedral
That I translated the last night.
That I stood it to the end,
proudly, you can bet your sweet
intervals of loneliness.
Tsk, tsk, the gardener’s push
to extreme moment of
acceptance of, loss as poster-dragon-teeth crossed.
Flisk, flisk, the merry wiper
of too many doldrums in wine-bars,
keepers and keepers only finders.
Miles itched and all egging sense is gone,
and why indifferently
this entrance of shooting dandelions,
the wiser than touch-me-not scents,
places much buttery session
to be raised from ocean.
It is telling at the door,
low-keyed and barbered
being floor, that you could and you would.
I am cold, I am cold,
I am growing through the holes
in my sweatshirt elbows
finny for tinsel.
Take that, you bastard pedestals,
take that, you stilts, you partners on offerings built.
Take that, you tricky-ticklers, you brick-bats,
you flow-joints, you hackers of the risk-free.
I am cold and I am cold, I am cold,
I am morphine in the showing mold.
Now if the cornrows
had only seen better chances in quilts,
this never would have happened,
this or any other strung-out night.
So these cares crash for hours in estuary;
or if no nonsense, then no sergeant grins,
then no takers in pen, in grill.
This humming burns lightly till,
and there is a branching flavor,
and I will be colder and simple,
and I will flood to berm
of the unbeholden,
and I will give this my
shirt to the needy,
I will be inventing peat-money.
– by Robert Mueller
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Manhattan resident Robert Mueller has been a contributor of poems and essays to Spinozablue for the past year and longer. He is also an avid commentator, a practice and inclination that comes in part from his experience as a teaching assistant for comparative literature classes at Brown University. The style of teaching and writing that he promotes is big on discovery, inspiration and fun and not always so big on meeting expectations. Other writings appear on line in Jacket, Ink Node, SugarMule and Moria and in such print publications as ELH, Centennial Review and American Letters & Commentary. An essay is forthcoming in a book on words writers love (and loathe) edited by Molly McQuade and due out from Sarabande Books in October 2010.
Copyright © 2009, by Robert Mueller. All Rights Reserved.
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What wonderful poems. I want to comment on the first.
Community Still; such an Elizabethan beginning and a few lines more are suggestions of American Indian cosmology, two vastly different world views or are the sacred hoops for the skipping girl. And the poet can’t write the ragged horizon (but it’s there for the reader to look at and think about.) This poem is so willfully suggestive. Things are bouncing off each other and making gorgeous sounds. The poem is a voyage. Have we come full circle? Is the pipe the Indians again? And who is the Queen of Part-Day: Elizabeth? I’m not asking the poet these questions. They are for the reader to think about.