Foot of the Lake Poetry Collective

John Walser holds a Bachelor’s degree in English, with a minor in philosophy, from the University of Evansville and a doctorate in English and Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.  A founding member of the Foot of the Lake Collective, he is working on a chapbook of poetry tentatively entitled Slough, as well as a full-length manuscript, Edgewood Orchard Galleries. His poetry, which has appeared in a number of journals, explores the themes many other writers before him have explored: celebration and sexuality, beauty and sorrow, aging and identity, the finding and fading of love; yet infused within his poems is the scenery and imagery of the upper Midwest, where he has lived most of his life: the lakes and lake flies, the Kettle Moraine, Door County; the grey skies and long winters, the singular and gnarled trees with bare branches that can be found at the centers of plowed farm fields, the smell of the flowers and the taste of the fruits that grow in our backyards.  Many of his poems deal with romantic entanglements and the layers and layers of sediment that settle below the surfaces of those relationships.  All, he hopes, are mosaic in their presentation, each image a discrete facet.

John is an associate professor at Marian University where he teaches a wide variety of courses in literature, composition, and creative writing, and where he coordinates the writing concentration.  In 2008, he was awarded that university’s Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award.

MIDDLE RELIEF

Messenger of arthritis and stoop, ex-catcher’s knees,
of bark and splinters, of a cragged ice sky – mud in his cleats –
my manager  slows halfway there, raises his right arm, taps that wrist twice
a sign for me that spring is really just almost summer,
almost fall, almost injury, almost off season

that the metronome sprinkler spray
that wets the outfield, the warning track
gives way to freezing rain that makes flat surfaces
an equation, a science class experiment on inertia.

I want to tell people that I have thrown this ball
until my shoulder is a hollow socket, is a grey tar tatter
paper house, a skincracked oak tree, blank fields, the steepest
drainage ditch along the roadway.

My job is another’s failure: two men on, a run already in,
nobody out,  a screen that stops foul balls, that catches
briefly before she leaves the sepia photograph,
the knothole-spine soft-sand small of her back.

In this pinch of sun, this afternoon game, if I close
my eyes, the lids are painted celluloid.

I do not think of finishing, nor was I meant to.

Now my stretch, my wrist, my fingers, my right arm are strange
hieroglyphs of bird’s legs, this  leather rubbed to complacency
a fist, an iodinestained moon.

My job is pretending: the spot is not the spot,
the speed is not the speed, the spin stutters
and disintegrates some promise that drops like munitions.

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