The HyperTexts

Mark Blaeuer

Mark Blaeuer grew up in Illinois but has also resided in Pennsylvania, Colorado, Utah, and Arkansas. He was employed for many years as a park ranger and an archeologist but now researches, writes about, and presents programs on Hot Springs, Arkansas, baseball history. His poems (as well as a few translations) have appeared in several dozen literary journals, including Able Muse, Antiphon, The Centrifugal Eye, Chrysanthemum, The Edge City Review, The Ekphrastic Review, El Portal, The Lyric, Measure, The Plains Poetry Journal, Pudding, The Raintown Review, Slant, SPSM&H, Westview, and The Windsor Review. Kelsay Books published a collection of his work in 2014.



Metamorphosis

I reach for a CD of Bach
by Gould:
dead these two, ethereal logic now.

My disc is put away as the sun
levitates, and light
strained through windowscreen
checks into a small room.
Morning slants over
the rock slope’s ivy and lady fern.
Dirt daubers mud their tunnels at one eave;
phoebes flit
off the magnolia shadowing our roof,
nab an occasional wasp.
Holly, dogwood, azalea, wisteria, redbud, jessamine—
all attract bees.
Ephemerids wed their only dancing hour.

Johann Sebastian traveled centuries and leagues
to change with Glenn in spring,
to revive.

Originally published in Along the Path



To a Friend in Wilderness

Love is a habitat
of mind
high wanderlust
can never find.

Endangered feelings thrive
within
a stable heart, away
from din.

Repeat your vow,
a whippoorwill
as constant as the dusk
is still.

Originally published in Piedmont Literary Review, reprinted in The Victorian Violet Press & Journal



Lure

Off this or that
point.
Aluminum angles
naked, day

split by the whirring reel,
a down‑home
plunk
at line’s end.

Ripples
in placid water.
Sun casts monofilament—
gold leader,

its bait the world,
shadow at bay.
I
don’t resist.

Originally published in Potpourri, reprinted in The Victorian Violet Press & Journal



Humanity’s Work

Translated from the Spanish of José Asunción Silva

Deep in the ancient forest where,
one night at opening of May,
there played in tangled maidenhair
the pallid moon’s initial ray,

a few months later, gaslight dawn
in depot’s lamp served to reveal
a locomotive bedlam on
the double track of hardened steel,

and safe beyond the former nest,
soft lodging of an avian choir,
communication has progressed:
a valentine through copper wire.

Published in Blue Unicorn                            



Leafing Through the Bible on a Winter’s Morning

Above a line of seemingly dead branches,
the sap as quiet and as powerful
as hieroglyphics (thank Champollion)
no preacher dares to read, the sun emerges

as a self‑sufficient dynamo.
There is no deity required here,
no id, I AM, or hybrid Phaeton:
no sons. Icicles glow, reflecting red,

as if they were an insect’s compound eye,
the image multiplied a thousandfold.
It’s obvious, no Nordic would define
a reservoir of fire as a hell—

it brightens every solitary thing.
These pages don’t; they’re only good for kindling.

Originally published in Paintbrush



Blithe Imperialist

Pre-presidentially,
Theodore Roosevelt
touted “Talk softly and
lug a big stick.”

When he yelled “Bully!” at
Rhinocerotidae,
Ted let an elephant
gun do the trick.

Published in Light



Winter Journal: Stray Facts

“I have now found the law of the oak leaves,”
wrote Hopkins on the 19th of July,
the year of his Lord 1866.
I, on the other hand, see only sticks
devoid of life. Pathetic alibi,
cerebral chemistry no pill relieves
in truth. Although our morning is “v. fine,”
the dog and I are weighted to a chair.
A dying larva in a chrysalis,
however, yields more energy than this
heft in a green recliner. Everywhere,
linoleum is lit with the divine
spark, so cliché, of a bacterium
to which my dog and I will yet succumb.

Originally published in Angle



On Trap Mountain after Work, 1997

I lean my staff against novaculite
outcrop, sit. Breather for a would-be god.
How classical the Ouachitas, how right
for scuppernong to twine around the flawed
bole of an unusually hoar oak.
Bare Mountain on an 1891
map (cedar bald? fire? did a rail line stoke
cut-and-run?), now it’s green as Helicon
in these few minutes of a dying sun.
Clambering up beside me: the bank loan
on this land, fax, computer, telephone . . .
Tomorrow’s pointed at me like a gun,
and all I have for self-defense is my
knife-sharp belief that even the gods die.

Originally published in Parnassus Literary Journal

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