Mikel Vause holds a Ph.D from Bowling Green University. He is the author of numerous articles, poems and short stories, and the author or editor of over fifteen books. His poetry collections include I Knew It Would Come to This (Mountain and Air Books), At the Edge of Things (Green Cat Press), Looking for the Old Crown (Fusion Productions), The Scent of Juniper (Aldrich Press), A Mountain Touched by Fire (Aldrich Press/Kelsay Books), A Last Call for Young Men (Kelsay Books), A Home to Strange Animals (Kelsay Books), Secondary Sources Kelsay Books), and A Most Terrible and Deadly Season (Aldrich/Kelsay Books). Kelsay Books will release a new collection of nature poems in December 2023. In 2016, he received a Pushcart Prize nomination for his poem “What said the Thunder...” Mike Vause is a Brady Presidential Distinguished Professor at Weber State University where he teaches British and American Literature.
For twenty years, Mike also taught rock climbing and, as a member of the American Alpine Club and British Alpine Club, served as the only non-British Chair of the Boardman/Tasker Mountain Literature Award. In 2011, Vause was an invited member of the CE British Expedition to the Northside of Mt. Everest in search of the body of Andrew Irvine of the 1924 British Everest Expedition.
For the last ten years, Mike has taught Literature and Law CLE courses for The Scriber’s Quill in conjunction with The Utah Bar Association and The Utah Judges Group.
Work
What said the Thunder...
"What said the thunder..."
--T. S. Eliot
Lightening shatters cobalt sky
Jagged electricity charges to earth
As if an angry Zeus
Is visiting destruction
On all living
The blinding flash
Followed by a crack of thunder
Children count the time
One-one hundred
Two-one hundred
Three-one hundred
An attempt to judge
If they should be scared
When my dad was a boy
By the kitchen sink
Laser flash shot from black clouds
Blowing in from the southwest
Struck the vent pipe
Outside the window
Shattered glass showered daggers throughout the room
On the floor
Covered and cut
He was stupid for a while
Disoriented and lost
The air smelled of ozone
Scent of Satan
A black scar
Followed the pipe into the ground
Maybe clear to Hell
Or
It might have bounced back to the clouds
To recharge and strike again
Charlie Parker's Ghost
Charlie Parker's Ghost
After you remove everything that is possible, whatever left however improbable, is the truth.
--Sherlock Holmes
The music--magic
Crawls from the basement
Of the Porters and Waiters Club
Past black railroad men in starched
White linen and spit-shined shoes
Lounging on stairs
Or in dark corners
As blue notes spill out
On to 25th Street
These starched black men
Talk about life
Oh, yes sir, yes ma’am
About being colored
In white western towns
They came for music
Electric blood courses through miles
Of veins and vessels
Rhythmically blasting brains and memories
Just poor colored men
Doing some poor colored things
Thinking about poor colored girls
And white people
The Kozy
The Kozy
(for Bob Mikkelsen)
The smoother, rounder, and more solid...
—Julia Child
Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He
liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried
with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton
kidneys, which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.
—James Joyce, Ulysses
Forty-five years ago
on a cold Saturday morning
my dad loaded me in his
1952 Chev truck
headed east up Weber Canyon
for Echo, Utah
a whistle stop on the U P Railroad
a wide spot in the road
where the Weber and Echo Canyons split
The old highway and
U. P. tracks edge the river
a lone pine tree marks
a thousand miles from Omaha
Devil’s Slide
five-hundred-foot rock shoot
tilts seventy degrees
down the south slope
where gray limestone gives way
to fiery orange sandstone
The Kozy Cafe sits in the mountain’s shadow
dirty white wood-sided splendor
neon sign with an arrow
linoleum counters
bargain basement tables and chairs
worn wooden chair legs
squeal on the bleached hardwood
regular stop for cowboys and farmers
We came for the Sweet Breads
dipped in milk and egg
rolled in bread crumbs and fried crisp with bacon
served with eggs and toast
by a woman named “Fats” who’s as old as the red cliffs
cafe windows grown dark
parking lot turned dirt
Standing Guard: The Sandhill Crane
Standing Guard: The Sandhill Crane
She is laying their egg,/On this cold winter day.
He is standing guard,/Defining their territory.
--Spharox
Off to the West
Blood-red sun
Sinks below the sawtooth horizon
Of the Ruby Mountains
In minutes darkness will control the sky
Slowly stars appear a few at a time
And far from angry and poisonous city lights
Multiply and draw close enough to touch
Settled in cat-tails
And willows brown and yellow
And burnished red leaves blacken
Some trod into fine powder
A million foots-falls
Lead into the snarl of fallen, bleached Cottonwoods
Giants from a century past
And new junk trees,
Sweet-scented Russian Olives
And Japanese Elms are pulled skyward
By sunlight and pure air
Free from dark clouds of fossil fuel
Musty marsh of stagnant water
Decaying swamp grass and bull rush
Perpetuate the natural order of things
Life and death eternally repeated
In a million, private places constant and necessary
Dark, mysterious, intricate
A pool of primeval ooze
Awaits only a celestial spark
To start life anew
And Frozen in time
On one thin leg
Pencil straight
The other pulled up
Close to gray-brown feathers
Crimson crowned head tilts heaven-ward
Sings a holy litany
Echoed by its nesting mate
The noble head long beak
Scratches the silver-blue sky
A sentinel, a perfect watcher of the Earth.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I Knew It Would Come to This
At the Edge of Things
Looking for the Old Crown
The Scent of Juniper
A Mountain Touched by Fire
A Last Call for Young Men
A Home for Strange Animals
Secondary Sources
A Most Terrible and Deadly Season
