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  • Mule
  • Gerald Stern (bio)

What good did it do him to sit in the white tub and soap his back with a curved brush? He was a mule who circled around the monstrous stone from right to left, dragging and grinding and wearing the blinders, and one time he tossed the hay over his head and turned his teeth to one side to catch it the way a mule does, bending to eat the sweet and tasty grasses, and that’s when a stick of sorts was used to guide him; you should have seen him weighing tomatoes, in spite of the welts, you should have seen him unloading bituminous coal with a long shovel, pushing it down the chute the way he and his kind did every winter for twenty-five cents a load, give or take some. [End Page 160]

Gerald Stern

Gerald Stern is the author of two recent books, Stealing History, a book of prose, and In Beauty Bright, a new book of poems. He is the 2012 recipient of the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress.

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