corey.mesler

We Sing to Each Other

My friend, Ward, writes:
if you pray, pray for me.
I shoot back: what’s wrong,
what’s happened?
He says, it’s my daughter,
the darkness again, she’s cutting
herself. I write in return:
love her, man, love her hard.
It’s powerful medicine.

This is what we do. This is how
we talk when it gets this
bad. The healing words
aren’t really there. The words
that turn the devil back.
But we speak, we talk
to each other. I understand
the darkness. I under-
stand wanting pain.
I tell Ward: I will do anything,
you know, anything I can do.

This is what we say
when it’s onerous, a Sisyphean
rock. This is what we say
because we have to talk.
Because we have to try.
It’s a form of prayer. It’s a form
of dark hymn. Which we
sing to each other across
great distances, across great distances.

Stalking Poem

for Mandy Kallen

I stalk you with a quill
dipped in quiet.
I stalk you with a heart laid open
by crave.
Your face is a template
for a temple.
I wash my hands in the rain if
only to boast to the clouds.
I take one more look
at the fiery image etched in my
cave’s wall.
I stalk you with a club, a spade,
a diamond in the rough.
I stalk you with only these words,
damp, limp and inappropriate.
When you open your eyes that is
my face, as blank
as a twice-told tale. I stalk you with
my final front,
backed into a corner at last, my
icy coat, my rime.

2006

Shift

“Next to a gravestone/a green tin cup
brimful of shadows./Must we drink?”
Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser
from Braided Creek

We used to talk of death as if
it were Tahiti
or the Balkans. It was that remote.
Now, the mirror
is unkind and the women, in their
skirts, don’t even turn around.

Up, on Stage

At five a.m., moving
around in the house
he is a ghost, a spirit
invited there, to feed the dog,
to make the coffee.
Then suddenly he sees him-
self in the house as if
he were across the street looking
in. The yellow glim of the
kitchen light illuminates his small
gestures as if he’s on stage.
He looks a fool to himself then,
and the house, dark except
for where he is, seems a foreign
place, exotic, dangerous,
suspended over the abyss, the kind
of place he would, soon perhaps,
want to visit.

Character

Tom Meniscus, at first, did not realize that he had found the secret backstairs to the bedroom of his best friend, Rolland Hanson’s sister, Katelynn, who was both an invalid and a pink pants, so it was rumored, until he saw the cracked door and its buttery sliver of light and saw the upright, glimmering form of the young woman’s perfectly orbicular mammaries, clad only in diaphanous bedgown, nor did he know what he should do with this information except that he must keep it from his roommates, Jeff and Jerry Kinnoson, who were known around campus as party boys with forceful sexual proclivities, including the near-rape of a nubile, freshman bookbuster, according to some sources outside their fraternity, not to mention from Katelynn’s dipsomaniacal mother, Kathe, and her brutish father, Ron, Congressman Hester’s aide, which amounted to a real test of Tom Meniscus’s character, I’m telling you.

Corey Mesler

Fall 2005

Trying to Drag the Dead Tail to the Conclusion

The worm in the book represents the death
of the word. The vermiculate page
represents my life story crisping at the edges.
The darkness at the end, well, that’s
as far as I’ve gotten with what I’ve gotten so far.

Corey Mesler
www.burkesbooks.com

Wormiculation by Alex Nodopaka 2005

By Don Snell

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