URGE'S ENGINE, BY STEVE MUESKE |
Just to be is exacting and costly.
For every sublime moment, nature invents a new form of cruelty. For every love, a love remains masked. Every time I ache to cup your face, a wasp injects eggs into a tender caterpillar. Its young will eat their way out, oblivious to the tenets of malice. All it knew was the plant's scent of alarm: an urge too irresistible to ignore. What is urge’s engine, if not desire? For every light haloing the bloodgood maple, every arrival of a moon blued by smoke, a sparrow hawk shreds a pigeon mid-air, bloody feathers a spray of snowy unmaking. What are we to make of this ruthless end? I am troubled. My heart, a music box playing with old combs. And this is not the end of it. While driver ants march out of African mounds in miles-long rows, devouring everything in their path—plants, houses, the flesh of any living animal penned in the black tide—the ocean sings its single and everlasting note of praise. |
Steve Mueske is an electronic musician and the author of two poetry collections and a chapbook. His poems have appeared recently in The Iowa Review, Cream City Review, The Normal School, The Pinch, Verdad, Jet Fuel Review, Thrush, Verse Daily, and elsewhere.