Seeker Magazine

JBMulligan

just a word | seas of time, of space
dancing on water | last rain in March | tasting

JB took the editor literally when asked to write a "brief" bio: Married, three children, poems and stories in dozens of magazines over the years, including, recently, Clay Palm Review, Free Zone Quarterly, Wired Hearts and Unlikely Stories.

just a word
The snow is on the ground.
The ground is under the snow.
The night sky is a wave
hanging over the fleet of the clouds.
As far from noon as it gets,
in the simplicity
of shadows, exhaustion and beer,
something like sense
is over there, in the tree
between the house and the car,
not moving, though the breeze
lifts the maddened hair
of the midwinter willow
all around it. Something
like a meaning, a goal,
a center, among the branches,
whispering the truth.
No profusion of words,
no flourish of patterns,
just a word
that you can't quite hear.
But you know it's just a word.

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seas of time, of space
A school of street lamps disappears
behind a hill.
Among the plankton stars, the airplanes glide,
invisible sharks, without mercy.

At daybreak, brittle leaves
are sharded shells gathered
by the flow of the cold wind.

Diurnal waves in gush and thunder
shatter on mountains,
flow across plains,
pour like the ancient ravaging horde
over the eyes of the melting, anonymous dead.

The loss is in space: the absence of a child
stands in the window of a broken wall.
Its eyes are a solar eclipse,
to look into them - blindness;
its laugh is a buzzing of flies,
the constant industrious hum of destruction.
Its cry is the wind
through a huddle of bones
clustered like wood for a bonfire
in the alley below.

In time, new infants float
like bubbles up into the wind -
like pollen, balloons -
like newborn sea turtles
scratching down the slope of the beach
past predatory gulls and skittering crabs
to the burly, anonymous sea.

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dancing on water
The complex mathematics
of light on the lake,

a swarm of silver
crystals dissolving

in waves and reforming,
uniquely repeated,

the formulae
of chance and pattern

have an underlying
simplicity

of desire. For all
the assorted sizes

of worlds within worlds
containing worlds,

where a yardstick can be
light years or atoms,

or the length of the arm
of a long-dead king

(and all of it fitting
on one table),

we measure it best
with the naked eye

in the chest. Creatures
of chance and pattern,

we see a brother
dancing on water,

eager in being
to celebrate being.

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last rain in March
The fields and mountains soaked to a stark
edgeness, each dark- or light-barked tree
distinct as a feather on the circling hawk's
ethereal span. The earthen shell
is cracking, something is clambering out of
the wreck, shoving off the rubble,
rising in the mottled grey
of the wind, as if to say:
Somehow I've survived again. What now?
Or, I've been here before, I think.
Or, Give me my wings of pain and joy.

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tasting
drip the fau
drip the faucet
drip the FUCKING FAUCET goes
daily     driply the minutes drop
out of a life
bitterdrops
the same as sweetnectar
drip of a bird asky
tilting and dropping
behind illumined trees
drops out of a life

the accumulate
flavored with both
spreads     fills a body
with something thicker
than blood or water
a seasoned broth
of memory    experience

what the tongue learns
tasting     is
to keep tasting
drinking     gulping
licking the spoon the bowl

what the tongue learns
tasting     is
how the flavors
mingle     yet remain
distinct     linger
like the scent
of flowers closing their mouths
as the sky greys into black

what the tongue learns
tasting     is
calling out the names
the metaphors of being
existence     athrob

the tongue cries
good     or     bad
or     what the hell is this

drip the words
drip the words fall
drip the blessed words fall down
cool rain on the heated tongue

drip the days and words
fall down
gather and evaporate
until the last drop
drops out of a life

dew dries on the grass
frost fades on the grass
the hotbellied sky
drips light on the grass

what the tongue learns
tasting     is
this is grass
this is meaning
this is tasting
this is wet

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(Copyright 2001 - All Rights Reserved by JBMulligan - No reproduction without express permission from the author)

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Letter to the Author:
JBMulligan at frastus@frontiernet.net