SageGreenJournal.org voices out of the West, mostly poetry, personal to planetary...
sketch by the poet
Jack Mueller
Log Hill, Ridgway, Colorado
Legendary North Beach poet and organizer, Jack Mueller lived in the
San Francisco Bay Area for 25 years. His Kule Loklo poetry symposium at Pt. Reyes National Seashore was a seminal event for many West Coast poets. He directed a world poetry association and organized many large-scale poetry and art festivals in California. He spent several years as director of the International Museum of Arts and Sciences in McAllen, Texas. A few years ago he retired to a Log Hill Village hermitage outside Ridgway, Colorado, where he continues to write and inspire a diverse cadre of Western Slope poets. Widely published in literary magazines, he’s authored a number of books of poetry and essays, as well as several books of sketches, his most recent from Lithic Press of Colorado include Amor Fati (2013), The Gate (2014) and Budada (2015).
Jack (at right) reads from Amor Fati at Talking Gourds, Telluride 2014. left to right: Art Goodtimes, Danny Rosen, Jack Mueller (Photo Daiva Chesonis)
two poems, one long, one short,
by Jack Mueller
You will never
understand me,
I will never
understand you.
Love starts there.
When Women Ruled
When women ruled with their baskets
Men stood in the steaming overflow
A child had one parent—
Mystery incarnate was the other
& it was for the other
Men & women worked sang & killed
People knew that beauty was slow
Secret of elephants or a polished stone
That care in the watching unveiled design
A speechless pattern to follow
Hunter for the sight
Digger for the season
Shaman for a deeper sight
This meticulous devotion
Gave the people meat grain roots & wisdom
Slowly men discovered
The awful secret of their milk
The deep will of their seed
They took the granaries
Took women to their houses
Forgot old mysteries
Dug old death from the earth
Made it rise like themselves
Above the true heart of the land
All civilization
A substitute pattern born of false pride
& a wish without name to replace
lost melodies
All patterns faster & straighter than nature are lies
All symbols uprooted for surplus are lies
All image song & speech torn out of the tribe & sold are lies
All beauty & terror not born of water & land are lies
All states larger than a woman can walk in a day are lies
both poems from
Amor Fati, New & Selected Poems
(Lithic Press, 2013)
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