Laura Mullen
Blue Ear
What in whorls of flesh whirls caught
We can’t close goes ringing to resonant
Echo pour of a river once heard isn’t ever
Over flows under sound becoming music
Listening is a kind of humility the poet
Reminded us and What was it we wanted
To label “extraneous” the composer asked
While worlds went on gushing into us and
Air carried by blood rushed by percussive
While our openings were flooded with sky
The silence we say “the silence” of deep
We say “deep” space I hear forever now
Tuned into the slight but constant pressure
Of the brimming emptiness where you were
Elegies
Failures so constant they could almost be regarded as normal, something—in those
“chaotic,” “unprecedented,” times—to rely on.
He described how the dead branches had looked when living, hung along their length with
blossoms and glittering drops of rain.
A longing to sit with others in the charged space opened by a real question.
The phrase, “Like clockwork,” said admiringly.
Secretly recording the conversation I taped also my denial of the act of recording, that emphatic
“Of course not...”
Every few yards another rotting pelican, eyes gone, feathers matted, beak gaping, wings of bone
spread open on the beach as if the sand was a gritty brown sky.
Generously inventing excuses for those who were, in the new way of speaking, “ghosting” us.
Uneven maroon rectangle set in a vague frame of charcoal: another window.
Hinge of day, a crow’s repeated, sleepy-sounding inquiry.
Blown rose, breaking wave: that skittery attention, always asking, “What next?”
The deleted, revised, and again deleted text, glowing in memory.
Increasingly—as an armed and militarized police force became the first line of defense—it
seemed as if the most important thing was manners.
“My ‘stance,’” he informed her, stiffly, “is sorrow and horror.”
Specific achievable goals, manageable increments, and the destruction of everything.
Digging a hole near the surf’s edge, the little girl slams her shovel to the ground and shouts her
order: “Water, water, come up here.”
The Kandinsky Experience
“Kept a record of his travels”
Cloud shapes heavily outlined
Contained activity
On the level of the brush-stroke
Gestural silhouette
Hollowed out (
Held spaces [insecure] seeming
To belong to others) somewhere else
Shared
Color transfer of force “electric”
“Became concerned with the landscape”
Slash drag mop scribble Then
( )
and
Sketchy references to continuing
Attentiveness
Then
Isolation as fact
“And what you did is
...”
For a while I didn’t know what I was looking at—or the paintings, as
Background, allowed me to think of something else
Vague ideas about color and its application intentional open to
Possibility that specific teal interrupting a not entirely decided pink
Lavender stutter brightness unfocused
‘Abstract as music’ as
Lines of
Glass
‘Small pleasures’
‘Landscape with...’
‘We have to be brave for others’
What I wanted to say about
Wrong about
Dangling
From some more solid
Wounded maroon blue
Distance as quote
Dawn in memory
Shadows festoon
Departure’s lip
Laura Mullen is the author of nine books: her most recent collection, EtC, was published by Solid Objects. Recent poems appear in Posit and the Coach House anthology On Occasion, and forthcoming work includes nonfiction in Agni. Mullen is also a photographer and maker of poetry films (check Vimeo) as well as a translator: Black Square Editions published her translation of Véronique Pittolo's Hero, and her translation of Stéphanie Chaillou’s first book (something happens) was published by Lavender Ink / Diálogos; translated pages from Pittolo’s Helen a User’s Guide are forthcoming in Fence.