Mitchell Metz

CONTACT

549 Glenview Avenue
Oconomowoc, WI 53066

Mitchell Metz
Oconomowoc, Wisconsin

BIO

Mitchell Metz writes only because he never made it to the pros. His wife likes to remind him, "You never even came close." She's not into the Muse thing.

1999 Pulitzer Prize nominee Harvey Stanbrough has called Metz's poetry, "magnificent...sensual, frightening, emotion- packed," explaining that he "somehow has found a way to speak in a voice that is at once intimate and distant." Metz's work has appeared in nearly one hundred publications including Southern Poetry Review, Poet Lore, California Quarterly and Wisconsin Academy Review. He does readings frequently in southeastern and southwestern Wisconsin, and has appeared on Wisconsin Public Radio's "Higher Ground."

BOOKINGS

2008

POEM

PINEAL

I stroke my son's skull,
thumb the tympanic fontanel,
and despair. A bone clock,

it tocks closed
with organic precision—
measuring his retreat to self,

meting the remnants
of his lizard life, his perfect
unmediated eden.

Oh bone, open! Window
his vestigial eye—

that noble primitive
robed in frontal folds
like a shaman king drumming

the moon's rhythm
into muscle, egg, gut.

Never shutter his brain
from god's sun,
the ecstatic slam of Thou,

the lit world
that shortcuts eye

and I. Instead, bone, spread
like a lover's thighs

to nourish his pineal
with light

filtered pure by profane flesh
like rain through sand to Alph.

Mitchell Metz

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