Seeker Magazine

JB Mulligan

This month's "Portrait" features a poet from New York state, who states simply:

"As far as what makes me write, I suppose it is a combination of: not having a choice, trying to pass on the joy I've received through reading, competing with prior poets (may Harold Bloom break out in a rash), feeling maybe once I'll say something about an apple that will almost taste like an apple,…."

poem in search of a subject

Since I do and must believe
that a single thread runs through
the cloth of the sky, the trees
on the muscular mountains below,

extending into the soil,
burrowing into the core
of lava slowly cooling,
tendriling into the far

expanding swirls of black -
since all this raucous song
is echoing of the pluck
of one pure primal string,

an Ur-note sounding - since
this all describes one source
as a river's foamskirt dances
to a drop's unending course -

the subject of the poem
is one unlettered word:
pre-alpha, post-omega,
unuttered, always heard.

foggy morning

The fog droops like a cat's belly
over the trees at the top of the mountains.
The lake below is tarnished and smooth.

This silence is the sound
at the center of a relic.

My thoughts fly off, become lost:
I hear one of them squawking
as it wanders by above me.

The silence returns.
I fill like a glass.

theology

As if we did not fell the tree
but warmed ourselves by logs of it
spined with blades of flame

shifting, shaping, bleeding the dark,
our collars anchored to the wall;
the chains clinked and whispered.

(Somewhere outside the sky, the sun
inrupted to a point, the light
compacted to a gem.)

We traced a path on maps of air
before us. "Here's a spot," we said,
and, "Here's another spot."

(A point upon an endless line.
A point inside a skinless shape.)
We pointed. And described.

the cost of light

What is the cost
of light on the snow in the yard? -
late, the cars infrequently passing,
the moon low in the cloudless sky.

Nothing moves without wearing down,
nothing eats its time
and is not eaten,
consumed by its future.
What price for these moments
when the world seems physically entire,
this scrape of it, coherent, still,
moving with movements
we can understand?

Bit by bit we gather these chips
to a mound, an altar inside us,
the prayer of peace we have seen
and chanted with our eyes.

There is no price.
We have nothing to pay with.
This is the ghost
of a future time
when snow falls
and we are the peace it covers
and shows the shape of.

the face of God

Whatever gives you
the face of God.
Whatever turns the skin
to breath between you and the world:
the voices of unseen bodies,
the rails, the night, the river.
Each contained in the other,
tides in a glass
on a distant table -

how wet the lips are!

no ideas but in things

"We do not know, 'til we are tried, what we are capable of." Sara Broadhead, Gettysburg, 1863 The fence stretched out like the future, further than the eye could see. Covered with flies. "You could not see the wood." Ideas collided like 54-caliber bullets smashing into bone and sinew, soft lead expanding like an idea. Blam. Shattered. The wounded. The dying. The dead. All equally polite, waiting. "There's a man on the floor. You'd better look at him." Voice of the wounded, caring for the wounded. The battle flared, sun spots exploding on a bright, minor star, grave, important for so many buried without a name, states arranged in a semi-circle, the circle never closes, around a common spot - they sorted the buried, common dead, mined from graves and separated by uniforms and ideas. In the fall, they spoke, Everett for hours, the tall, lean, bearded man of humors, images, ideas, for a few quiet, luminous minutes, over the recently disrupted graves in which the summer dead had been spooned, bodies split, sundered by heat, ideas, meat and time, with boards by vomiting gravediggers, horrified and mournful, sweating, waiting for dusk and their families. Nothing prepares us, lumped on the couch, hearing the recitation of ideas, numbers, names, buzzing of innumerable flies on distant wood, for this: our past. Nothing prepares us for importance. Anonymous, blood-throbbing dead yelling and moaning from our past, our future, a present avoided. Gift of a debt to ideas. Nothing prepares us. Nothing. Our meat in graves. Ideas. We wait, in shorts, sucking down beer and lemonade, as if after an ad for a car or deodorant, something will show us ideas or things worth dying for. Icons of a true, passed god. Untried and guilty, we watch what we were, wondering how, and if.

(Copyright by JBMulligan, 1999 - No reproduction without express permission from the author)

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Letter to the Author:
JBMulligan at John.Mulligan@ey.com