Pilgrim Poet Roaming Rebel
Pilgrim Poet Roaming Rebel
An active imagination living in wakeful senses is the only way of overcoming what Coleridge calls the “lethargy of custom.” Thank goodness, then, for poets like Eric G. Müller who show us how it’s done. You are holding in your hand a book, which is a product of just this discipline of imaginatively grasping the fleeting moment. And it is also a demonstration of the equally great fact that any one of these moments is an entry point into the depths and heights of the human spirit. Müller never stints his attention – it is given with equal devotion to pebbles and to great works of art, and with equally tangential effects. In these poems the occasional meets the perpetual in an exhilarating dance that expresses love of life, the quirky individuality of perception and the close kinship between the pilgrim and the rebel.
~ Norman Skillen ~ Teacher and storyteller ~ From the Foreword
Excerpts
A Part in Us
there is a part in us
that betrays
it’s the yeast
that makes us rise
it’s the beast
that makes us fall
we get baked
or burned
depending on whether we
remember or forget
the part in us
that betrays
~ San Marco, Florence, Italy
And Still the Birds Tumble
Clouds bleed bullet
birds
above starved lamb
sleeping
between angels-turn-
human
while bats rip open their
chests
dropping hot tar
dreams
over winged skull with woman’s
smirk
into knuckle-sockets onto spiral
knees
below cracked cranium
listening
to jawbone-arms
prattle
twisted lies that
lie
around the bone-mount as the
hand
of the lowered shroud-body
rests
in a veiled lap like a
fish
with one blood-eye
reading
her unlocked barefoot
book
near a cross-drill that blinds the
disc-I-ple
and still the birds
tumble
when lotus flower-flames
open
around the nailed lamb that
offered
His last breath as the
tomb
shuddered and the ashes
flickered
Inspired by an exhibition of Albrecht Dürer’s woodcuts at the Clark Museum, Williamstown, MA
So What!
So what
If you don’t know
this or that!
As long as you still listen to the wind
hush through trees, or lash across
mountains, deserts or dunes;
and with closed eyes can detect the subtle
shifts in the nasals, plosives and fricatives of nature’s
complex tongue as it tells its simple tales.
So what
if you don’t know
this or that!
As long as you keep the lenses
of all your senses clean – so you can make sense
of a world, made senseless by indoor knowledge.
What if you knew
the real from the false?
What if?
Now that would be
the kind of knowledge
that would make sense!
~ Oregon Coast, near Yachats