Daniel Nester is the author of God Save My Queen (Soft Skull Press, 2003) and God Save My Queen II (2004), both collections on his obsession with the rock band Queen. His most recent book is The History of My World Tonight (BlazeVOX, 2005). He edits the online journal Unpleasant Event Schedule and is Assistant Web Editor for Sestinas for McSweeney’s. He is an assistant professor of English at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY.
After Schubert’s Sad Cycle of Songs
Fritz Wunderlich, Die schöne Müllerin
What happens to the suitor
who runs out of lullabies,
serenading
the miller’s daughter by the brook?
One answer is
she does hear him, she does emerge
at the front door
of what I picture to be
a wooden duplex in
East Cherry Hill, New Jersey—
the father still reels
from her last fling with
a heavy-drinking Irish kid
who lays wheels on the lawn
after the break-up.
She breaks the news
in that spacey way
only beautiful girls can do.
The boy cries in a parking lot somewhere,
and her father wails away
on a headboard
with a Black and Decker sander.
The headboard has vines and lilacs
painted on its bevels
and forms
a crest around the daughter’s hair
when she sleeps.
She’s an angel, after all—
an idol or maybe a messenger,
someone who passes memos
along to the low
and earth-bound.
Says they’re gonna die
and be ready for it.
Tells them to go up
that mountain, raze that field,
to kill the neighbor’s livestock.
Another answer—maybe
more correct one,
undistracted by a
gangly and thwarted childhood—
is this lovely mill-girl
listens to her suitor
grind against the window,
which she mistakes for
the propitious hum
of her father’s machinery,
and she does go down to the brook
and he does come up the hill
and the sound of the factory
drowns out the yelps
of their wild fucking,
that kind of fucking
only beautiful young bodies can do—
the kind that hurts,
the kind that no one forgets.
The feeling of an ankle
wedged in a car window
for instance, eyes
concentrated
on some fixed point
in the woods. And as he sins,
as he pounds away
and pins her arms
close to him,
his own guttural voice
bounces back.
It sounds to him
not as his voice
but as some otherworldly message.
This is the first sin
he commits
that really counts,
and when he sees
what he’s really done,
he opens his mouth
and starts to sing.
the miller’s daughter by the brook?
One answer is
she does hear him, she does emerge
at the front door
of what I picture to be
a wooden duplex in
East Cherry Hill, New Jersey—
the father still reels
from her last fling with
a heavy-drinking Irish kid
who lays wheels on the lawn
after the break-up.
She breaks the news
in that spacey way
only beautiful girls can do.
The boy cries in a parking lot somewhere,
and her father wails away
on a headboard
with a Black and Decker sander.
The headboard has vines and lilacs
painted on its bevels
and forms
a crest around the daughter’s hair
when she sleeps.
She’s an angel, after all—
an idol or maybe a messenger,
someone who passes memos
along to the low
and earth-bound.
Says they’re gonna die
and be ready for it.
Tells them to go up
that mountain, raze that field,
to kill the neighbor’s livestock.
Another answer—maybe
more correct one,
undistracted by a
gangly and thwarted childhood—
is this lovely mill-girl
listens to her suitor
grind against the window,
which she mistakes for
the propitious hum
of her father’s machinery,
and she does go down to the brook
and he does come up the hill
and the sound of the factory
drowns out the yelps
of their wild fucking,
that kind of fucking
only beautiful young bodies can do—
the kind that hurts,
the kind that no one forgets.
The feeling of an ankle
wedged in a car window
for instance, eyes
concentrated
on some fixed point
in the woods. And as he sins,
as he pounds away
and pins her arms
close to him,
his own guttural voice
bounces back.
It sounds to him
not as his voice
but as some otherworldly message.
This is the first sin
he commits
that really counts,
and when he sees
what he’s really done,
he opens his mouth
and starts to sing.
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