Lucian Mattison, Reaper’s Milonga

Gin Gang Milonga

It follows the slug of bell tongue,

rattle against the apple

of an ox throat. Hoof after

hoof, breath cluffed,

is this how we are all yoked?

Death steps a tight circle

maintains the image of moving

forward, always pulling in

closer to the center

of this ancient structure,

lugging the rotation

of our hearts. It pulls in worship,

interminable ring of filling

its own fresh hoofprints, lifetime

spent dancing atop hay rot –

palpably wet, overwhelming.

DC-based Argentinean-US poet and translator Lucian Mattison’s second poetry title—after Peregrine Nation (Dynamo Verlag, 2017)—is Reaper’s Milonga (YesYes Books, 2018), a collection of performative, even theatrical, first-person narrative lyric poems. Taking its title from the “Milonga,” an Argentinian musical/dance style considered, among other things, a more relaxed version of the tango, the poems in Mattison’s Reaper’s Milonga explore cultural divides, politics, art and love, composed in the blur between commentary, lyric and essay-poem. As he writes as part of the poem “Election Day,” subtitled “Cordoba, Argentina”:

The shopkeeper sells beef milanesa

by the yard, our neighbors

son pisses on his lover’s bed

and for the third time

blames the dog. Tio Carlos

keeps saying, honesty

is a jail cell, crooks the wardens,

as election ads preen television screens

with images of grandmothers,

rolling Pampa.

There is the occasional poem that falls a bit flat, such as “Homunculus” or “Death in Venice,” but on the whole, Reaper’s Milonga is filled with vibrant commentaries on culture, living and being, writing out a series of joyful, lively and precise poems that are highly astute, existing between and amid two powerful world cultures. As he writes in the poem “Circumambient”: “I still have yet to break / from this world of watching, // how the expanse in front of me / is actually the distending of my own chest, // distance between people more / a measurement of how small our worlds are.”