| Three Poems by Steve Mueske | ||
Complaints from Pygmalion’s Neighbor Days and days of it— this infernal hammering —chip, chip, chip, as if he’d had nothing better to do than whack at a chunk of stone. (Well, actually he didn’t— he was kind of a loser, this guy: No one ever came in or went out, except the pizza guy, and he was there practically every day). And just when I thought I’d get some peace, it really started to get weird: I heard all these kissing noises and thought, you know that he was buggering the pizza guy, but it turns out he made this statue of a woman and was carting it around with him, feeding it, dressing it—this sort of thing. He bought it flowers and wrote songs for it, and now there’s this woman over there. I don’t know what happened and maybe I don’t want to know, but the thing is, since I’ve seen her, I can’t stop thinking about her. The Fishtank is as crowded as the lobby— children press in close to the glass, watch yellow butterfly fish dart between columns of coral. Leopard sharks whip their tails in front of the leather-jacketed lovers kissing stage center. No one is interested in them. A man in a brown beret walks through, parting people, disinterested as a reef shark. Finally, he pauses, stands before the glass and the columns of descriptions listing the types of surgeon fish and wrasse. His mouth curves into a smile, and he turns and walks off to see the birds. Young mothers enter the lobby, strollers full of pointing, wide-eyed babies. A little boy down in front says "look at the huu-uuge fish" with expressive arms. A bamboo shark, twice the boy's size, is cruising before the glass, a large lidded eye daydreaming a tank of people with a lobby of swimming powder-blue, yellow, and convict surgeon fish. Bird and cleaner wrasse get together for a game of marbles, while green lamprey eels hang lazily from coral windows in the heat of just another summer day in fish Montevideo. A Pail of Green Beans Running down to the garden, his little feet pounding on the grass, this little-boy machine, this miracle of biology, legs wobbly from speed and warm sun, grass lush on bare feet, feels something banging on his leg, and he looks down, sees the arm, and there on the end of the arm, is a hand, and in the hand, a pail. "I am not a him," he realizes, "I am an I, and I have an arm, and a hand, and it is my hand that holds this plastic pail." I drop the pail and look at my hands because how strange and wonderful to have a flabby pink thing called a hand, and bendy things called fingers that can grip and hold things, and see how I can move them like this, and like this? Now I hear my mother calling me, and I must go, so I go on to the garden, on my legs, on my feet, and put beans into the pail so that I can snap them in the cool of the garage where there are insects and toys. Once there, I marvel at the motions of my hands, at the joy of moving my hands, of being Me, and I am already making plans to guard this secret with my life.
STEVE MUESKE is a prose writer and poet from the Midwest. His work as appeared in both electronic and print format in journals such as the Wisconsin Review, The South Dakota Review, Water-Stone, ArtWord Quarterly, ForPoetry, SalonDAarte, Niederngasse, Southerncross Review, New Renaissance Magazine, Mobius, and elsewhere. He lives in Burnsville, Minnesota, with his wife and two daughters, and is currently at work on his first novel, tentatively titled The Valley Between Moments. He is the editor of Three Candles (http://www.threecandles.org). Click here to
read more of Steve Mueske's poetry in ForPoetry.com.
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