#BLauthor7: Matt Mauch

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#BLauthor7 is Matt Mauch.

Matt Mauch is the author of If You’re Lucky Is a Theory of Mine and Prayer Book, and the chapbook The Brilliance of the Sparrow. He hosts the annual Great Twin Cities Poetry Read, co-hosts (with Paula Cisewski) the Maeve’s Sessions readings, and edits the anthology Poetry City, USA, an annual collection of poetry and prose on poetry.. Mauch teaches in the AFA program at Normandale Community College, and lives in Minneapolis.

We've published Mauch before, in BL #20, and are thrilled to do so again.

Here are two new untitled Mauch poems from a longer series in progress, and check back next week for a guest post by the poet:

*

For every obvious thing, there’s a three-dimensional chess set

of subtextual things

a songbird come from summering north of here

reminds me of what I’ve lost,

like an estate sale ad

packed with so many implausibly well-kept treasures

it’s no big thing it has a heart,

can fly away when it needs to,

sings as if it’s been sinkhole-swallowing

fairy-tale endings

since the dawn of story time,

has mashed them all up and is blowing them stunningly

out now along the trough of a rolled wet tongue

on this just made noteworthy

day that my chain link

fence becomes something I’ll set

on a forever and ever shelf

next to the window I once took a photograph of lightning through,

and for the bird burdened by things

things with wings are seldom burdened by

is a better spot to rest

than down by the lake

or hidden among the dew-laundered leaves

drying out in the trees, birdier places, they, most flyers

not from here content to fly on, and what beyond flying

farther south this one must augur

or prophesy or presage

or change if it arrived via time

travel, who can say

before the inciting act, pistol that’s not a pistol

not yet hung on the wall,

the point-of-view character assigned to tell our story

still conducting research

with binoculars,

hoping to get one of us in bed, pin us against a wall,

bend us over a chair or corner us in a stopped elevator

before the credits roll, everybody

we can think of who got us here

listed alphabetically, or in order of appearance,

names going by so fast

nobody’s able to read them, the garages

all along the alley enough like a canyonned city, Tuesday

enough like rehearsal space,

morning enough like an opening scene,

that the bird making a ruckus

and I are as we all are at all beginnings: anonymous,

in windows yet to be zoomed in on, in our skyscrapers

of wants, needs, and influences,

not filled to capacity, parking garage in the basement,

bar with a view second floor from the top, making up aubades

in the pre-dawn dark, in the post-dawn light,

when somebody says our name, and it sounds like

our name with a decodable message

hidden in it, like a silent t, and the message

could be I love you, or the message could be

I can clean/tap dance/sew

if you can cook/remember birthdays/tell jokes well/mow,

so we turn, hoping what we heard is

exactly what we thought we did.

*

May you live through 1,000 winters, albeit

living with “live” and “winters” broadly defined

I’m glad that this body and mind, this space and place and

time I live within and among

serves biannually as a place of rest

for a bird with wintertime reservations

in the Yucatan. It’s the old story,

the bird’s and mine, sojourner meets the hunker-down

to share opposite truths on how to make it through the coldest days

trusting the most resonant voices within.

I tell the bird, Crawl when you need to. Protect your underside.

Use your wing like I use my hand, as a shield of last resort.

The bird tells me, Your stomach more so than your brain

is the part of you that remembers best what needs remembering most.

I write down what the bird says on an index card I carry in my pocket

on the opposite side of which

I write that I was born blue, drowning in my mother’s fluids.

The porcupine, opossum, and artichoke

protect the self with what the self provides,

thinking small, then smaller than that, then smaller still,

till they become the issuers of the voices within.

The dormant and hibernating trees, grass, frogs, turtles, and bears

dream that they’re inside the house with all the lights on,

are at the party, mingling.

Pretty soon they are. Pretty soon it’s spring.

Last time, my bird friend brought tequila. 

Co-ed Stacia M. Fleegal on Mauch: Matt Mauch is a poet I trust implicitly to take me for a scenic drive through his imagination, which seems always to be rife with associations so unique that they're familiar -- "For every obvious thing, there’s a three-dimensional chess set / of subtextual things." In Mauch's latest poems, the common denominator, the image that ties everything together and grounds the poet's consciousness, is also the thing that flies, propels us through his lines: the bird. In the first poem, the bird is a reminder of the social contract of a relationship and "reminds me of what I've lost"; in the second, the bird is a guide or mentor, returning to and resting within the speaker to impart wisdom -- "Your stomach more so than your brain / is the part of you that remembers best what needs remembering most" -- and tequila. These are poems to reread over and over because it's impossible to be bored or lost in a Mauch poem. Rather, reader and poet, all our brains and feelings and flights of fancy, "are at the party, mingling."

What do you think of Mauch's poems? Let us know in the comments.