Spring 2006 Museletter

Museletter Poetry Page

The Blues
Editor: Wendy Vardaman

GOING OUT FOR NEW ORLEANS

Some evening when the air is so mild
it subdues even the loudest of talkers,
take your New Orleans friends to a place
where the host wears a ruffled shirt
with silver cufflinks and offers
the house wine or sherry as the perfect
complement to any meal.

The talk is tentative and the piano,
bass, and drum kit wait for the first set.
The waiter suggests a platter of crawfish
and cups of chicken gumbo soup.
For the main course, you can order
a shrimp jambalaya that leaves your mouth
tingling in time to the drummer's cymbals.

When the combo plays a 12-bar chorus
and repeats, this is the way of the blues,
where lost and found balances like a tightrope
walker, and right on the beat the waiter
appears with praline and café brulot.

You and your friends talk homegoings
like tight-rope walkers who know the net
is ripped in more than one place.
The sax improvises on the trumpet's line.
When the bass walks easy and the drummer
slides his brushes, the combo repeats the chorus.

—Richard Roe, Middleton

WOMAN AS COASTER

This is my life's work:
to keep you
from leaving a mark,
to contain
your spilling parts,
to be that flat nothing
you fondle
when you have nothing
decent to say,
to be your rain gutter,
to carry your weight,
your cold
smothering weight.

—Cathryn Cofell, Appleton

BACK WATER BLUES

watch me drift into
midnight muddy
waters howlin' hey
now howlin'
wolf, casting lead
belly bobbers - hush hush
mississippi - I'm
just fishin' and it ain't
nobody's business this
whiskey headed night
rolling hoodoo road
long lonesome river
little rain rocking
to morning coffee blues.

—Linda Aschbrenner, Marshfield

GREYDAYS

I saw the sun the other mourning
as I drove into town. He was standing
just above the horizon,
holding a faint sign: the east.

—Lincoln Hartford, New Lisbon

FRANKIE COX

Our homes burrowed into the cold ground
cutting into the shoreline of Lake Superior
where the Irish, Norwegian and Polish stewed
in a maze of shipbuilding, music and booze
while Frankie Cox played his golden saxophone
down by the docks at the International Club
where the bar's low lights and smoke-hinged air
diluted his blackness in the drink-laced crowd.

—Susan Kileen, Watertown

VISTA

The lake is smooth and turquoise as a Formica
plastic countertop—that color they called aqua
in the sixties, though it looked nothing like water
until now.

Even in nature the color seems unnatural, startling:
aquarium-gravel cyan of greenbrier berries,
ethereal sky manifesting on the hydrangeas,
the nobody's-home aquamarine eyes
of a spotted horse.

Everything shall be that cerulean hue
when I have my way: skin, string, condoms,
cement, lawns, leopards' lustrous pelts as blue
as the clouded flesh of air.

All the objects will align themselves neatly
on a non-reproducible azure grid,
pale intentions and paradigms
as abscissa and ordinate vanishing into
an ordered, tenuous future.

Intangibles will melt like blue moon ice cream
into a sticky, contiguous layer, the same thickness
for everyone, syrup smoothed by a small child
until the surface is perfectly even,
even though she will not share.

That child has eyes the color of the lake and she
is not, was never, me.

—F.J. Bergmann, Poynette

BLUES ON A NORTH CAROLINA NIGHT

Down at a bog water juke joint,
a sharecropper's son sidles in
on a North Carolina night
to work his beat-up box guitar
and whisper low and lonesome
'bout a black-haired beauty
who brought him the blues.

His muddy brown boot keeps time
takes him to the funky side of the South
where ghost light gleams in swamps,
sounds from six strings rise
plump from the Piedmont,
and memories dark as muscadine
haunt every step.

He walks these strings
all tang and sweet-bottomed
keeps the bass beat going
with a bruised thumb
and lets his guitar talk
of hard times and travels
on tobacco road.

It's a percolating rhythm,
bold as a bullfrog,
old like a river he rides
among azaleas and dogwood,
loblolly and long leaf pines,
searching for a sweet gal
who done him wrong.

He rocks it sly and mellow,
makes that jelly roll,
when he puts bent blade to steel
to bleed out a blue note
all rump, red rooster and
Saturday night.

Outside, the rain applauds
as he deals one last chord
to a song he's rolled
and tumbled so many nights
praying for his Danville girl
to make her way back home..

—John Bloner, Jr., Kenosha

FEBRUARY

All winter
the sky's a gray hammer

when I'm outside
I stare at the ground

so it won't hit me

—Michael Kriesel, Aniwa

HOUSE OF BLUES, 1959

She drove an air-conditioned Impala the color of Summer Blues
Delphinium and decorated her unused kitchen with a few well-selected
pieces of Meissenware. She reserved for their private quarters
all the blue spilled over from the summer sky.

They slept in separate beds, each shrouded in ocean blue:
she between two layers of wool; he with an electric connection.
The same blue carpeted the floors, flowed through his dressing room
and hers, like a silent stream to the room she called her haven.

It, too, was a place she never used. Meant to be the most
intimate room in the house, the library waited in shades of blue,
unpacked boxes stacked around the goose-down stuffed,
pin-stripe covered reading chair, three years after the move.

She spent her days at the club, doing I'm not sure what.
She didn't mention blue skies she'd seen while playing golf
or tennis, swimming in the pool. It was I who saw them late
afternoons, just as the sun began to nestle in

among the subdued hues of the Japanese-inspired landscape.
Following orders, I turned the sprinklers on,
and droplets of water reached skyward to touch the blue
in an arc of glistening pleasure.

—June Nirschl, Baileys Harbor

Theme for Winter issue:
Spring Cleaning

Deadline:
Friday, May 5, 2006