Cheers—Mischa Willett
"Here it is—ceremony, sediment, and offering that, revelers, you and I propose: a toast."
Stack Takeover: Mischa Willett. Over the next two months, we’ll be reading poetry from Mischa every week, including four poems published for the first time on this Substack. For an introduction to Mischa, read Ben Palpant’s interview with him here.
Cheers
by Mischa Willett
“Here’s mud in your eye,” the drinkers used to shout, meaning, I think, may this drink be Christ, who spit and crouched And mixed a paste, restoring sight to peasant he’d just met by applying the tincture (but why?) into his blinded eye. I don’t know what to make of it, the story or the phrase. “To health” made sense when gin medicine was de rigueur, but these days most drink to kill time, blunt sense, dull pain not restore from sloth or ill. Less curative than blamed therefore, mud cart before the drunk horse: Let’s raise one still to the health of our host! Here it is—ceremony, sediment, an offering that, revelers, you and I propose: a toast.
Mischa Willett (Ph.D.) is the author of two books of poetry, including The Elegy Beta (2020) and Phases (2017) as well as of essays, translations, and reviews that appear in both popular and academic journals. A specialist in nineteenth-century aesthetics, he teaches English at Seattle Pacific University.
Photo by Corina Rainer on Unsplash
"most drink to kill
time, blunt sense, dull pain"
I love the way these two lines are set up: the separation of 'kill' from 'time' makes it feel much more sinister for a moment while your eyes jump to the next line. Then you feel a little relief, but you know that sinister feeling shows something about how we ought to view these things. They are the way of death after all (or often lead to it)...
I enjoyed Willett’s decision to actively grapple with the story of Jesus and the mud tincture within the lines of this poem (and, in those lines, I became a co-grappler). This is everything a poem should be.