Two Poems
Mark Blaeuer

Lessons in Period

Music History: he emphasized
the Middle Ages’ pre-polyphony
more than half a semester. By its end
we’d limped—barely—into High Baroque.
He read verbatim out of a textbook
and made us memorize its clotted prose,
but alter ego was much glitzier.

Sponsor of the college marching band,
he led them up a candy-strewn thoroughfare
each autumn at homecoming, uniformed.
One year, after triangles and drums
had shaken alumni flesh and Doppler effect
depressed their sound, an ambulance’s siren
aired the arch power of dissonance.

In a crimson V-neck at Ireland Field,
the student senate rep, possessed of bleak
news, wrestled with the delicate: “He was
rushed to hospital, and . . . and . . . let us have
a moment of silence.” Charging out, our assistant
football coach grabbed away the microphone
and, after feedback, verbalized harsh fact:

“I don’t think you people understood.
He died. Professor died.” So there we had it—
blunt speech, offensive and defensive lines,
opposed to flowing monody in Latin
nobody understood when he gently placed
the needle at recorded Kyrie
in our classroom, a cortège in his heart.

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Originally published in The Barefoot Muse (Summer 2007) and later in Mark’s collection, Fragments of a Nocturne (Kelsay Books, 2014).

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Curdlemore

He swore he’d never live in Arghansas
again, and if he did, it wouldn’t be
at Curdlemore, and if it was, not that
darned Vixen Street, and if so, not the raw
funk of You-All Apartments, Hole 10-C.

Low rent. Sweet air at Woo Pig Laundromat,
a scent of leatherwork at Flyting Possum.
Ingesting verity in George’s Ye
Majestick Lounge, which honorably sat
across from Hutch of Books, hard downhill from

his flat.
He gravitated to the old address,
a building of dark brick and trumpet vine.
Ungentrified. Historic seediness.
A place, one might say, for the genuine.

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First published as ‘A Perfect Contempt’ in The Borough (September 2024).

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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