Two Poems
Mark Blaeuer

Methought I Saw My Late A-Soused Haint

Chilled, cowering behind a serifed R
in this recurrent dream with a deep chute
beneath, I press a button to reboot
the Morphean and surface at Hack’s Bar
outside of Paradise. The avatar
of night lays hold: I’m blind and dissolute,
John Milton angering a leather-brute
with BELIAL tattooed across one scar.
I gravitate toward the piety
of volleyball (a chanted phrase), pale wit
spiked over the front line: 11-3.
Aware now of some military bit—
La Marseillaise—I sing, reluctantly,
until Charles Baudelaire tells me to quit.

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Mark’s notes: “In 2010 this Petrarchan sonnet appeared in The Flea, one of Paul Stevens’s Australian journals. It became the last piece in Fragments of a Nocturne (Kelsay Books, 2014). It’s modeled after ‘Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint’ by John Milton. As an undergrad in the 1970s, I took a one-semester course on Milton. Each student was required to memorize and recite a fifty-line passage from Paradise Lost. My section consisted of lines 192 through 241 of Book I, beginning ‘Thus Satan talking to his nearest mate’ and ending with ‘Not by the sufferance of supernal power.’ How this resulted in a dream poem, I’m unsure. Maybe the bikeresque figure in the octave is a Hell’s Angel.“

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Hollywood

All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
Plastic surgery expunged all traces.

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Mark’s notes: “Here is a ‘tailgater” that first bobbed along publicly in the 2018 flow at The Asses of Parnassus. I’d plucked its opening line from ‘The Old Familiar Faces” by Charles Lamb. All I had to do then was write the responding line. Something on television recently called this little observation back upstream in my memory.”

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Mark Blaeuer lives just south of Lofton, Arkansas. He was a ranger for many years at nearby Hot Springs National Park, and his M.A. is in Anthropology. His poems (and a few translations from Spanish) have appeared in 100+ magazines, such as Better Than Starbucks, Bindweed, The Borough, Ezra, Grand Little Things, The HyperTexts, Lighten Up Online, The Orchards, Passionfruit Review, Pulsebeat, Susurrus, Ultramarine Literary Review, and Wales Haiku Journal. His collections are Fragments of a Nocturne (Kelsay Books, 2014) and Surfacing Below (SurVision Books, 2025). He’s also written a couple of history books: Didn’t All the Indians Come Here? (Eastern National, 2007 [out of print]) and Baseball in Hot Springs (Arcadia Publishing, 2016).

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Two Poems Mark Blaeuer

Two Poems
Mark Blaeuer