Poetry

Mike Maguire photo

By

Alejandro Escudé

The Mueller Report (An Embroidery)

You have determined that the Report be released

to the public. Why should it be held behind this icy wall?

You have all been waiting for it for eternity.

Even before you left our mother continent, your feet split wide,

your mouth a thousand mouths, you were waiting

for this report—and even when your horse stopped

on the hill, just short of Lambeth Palace

and you noticed that strange, squat light to the east,

you were waiting to read it. Why should it be kept in a cave?

That little island and the seven mounds of dead black birds.

So far, rain hasn’t fallen on the pane of glass

scrolling out wet indictments. So far, the road doesn’t end

at the zenith, yet is there a gap in the coverage of our holy law?

What would you be caught doing? What blood-stripped maw

has eaten the razor blade of treason? 

Pass it back and forth from the fat attorney to the goodly Congress.

Let us see where the White River originates.

He must be sitting somewhere reading it, the priests all say,

while the rest of us, the people, drive our familiar city streets.

How many countries does the long, thick report link? Its many sheets?

I once saw Kerouac’s “On the Road” scroll at the Autry Museum,

the constitution of the Beats. Did Bill Burroughs wait to release that too?

Oh red-brick buildings of San Francisco! Oh fairy-Mueller,

correspondents eat at your favorite restaurant just to get close to you.

We’re approaching an American time that chills our souls;

the Mueller Report hidden on a newly-minted page of dollar bills.

Never try to capitalize a report without any further indictments. 

It’s like a cemetery on an early Spring morning. All fog and depression.

A fit woman in purple Lululemon and her unmistaken beau.

Two legs make four. And four legs make eight.

You hear about it again: what is in the report, the President’s fate.

In Florida, Trump wears the same black coat and gestures loudly

in the silence of camera’s frame. “Use the long iron, sir.”

And isn’t it nice that you’re in the clear? A no mulligan-life. 

A five-par hole, the water hazard between you and the dead yellow flag.

Was collusion nothing but a first-term snag?

You broke your neck in Washington D.C. before you rode the train

to the National Portrait Gallery where you stared into Gertrude Stein’s stony eyes.

It was hot. There were mosquitos and flies.

Still, the Report disintegrates in your hands like yellow newspaper.

You lift the pieces from the ground and the ground itself disappears.

“Two if by sea,” sounded off Paul Revere.

In Bowling for Columbine, Moore states we all live in fear.

But you will determine whether America should read the Report.

Hell would seem to suggest it is substantial enough to be released.

And yet you, sir? Are you? Or, do you work for— the beast?

Alejandro Escudé

Alejandro Escudé’s first book of poems, My Earthbound Eye, was published in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.