I reviewed Laura Mullen's new book for Ron Slate's _On the Seawall_.
If you work for an institution, or if you write poems, or if you're an older woman, or if you've experienced the wrath of sociopaths, or if you have or are a cow, the book is a must read. Mullen is fierce, and funny.
Clothes pins rest like quarter notes, triplets, on a one line staff.
Rain burble, bird squabble (at least when the cat’s outdoors).
Palm fronds hang like sad wigs, tired of water’s weight.
Hard to know if the pins play in major or minor key.
Bird squawks an awkward percussion, behind finch chatter.
Do anything to avoid the madness that is not mad enough
to leave realism behind, its authority assumed, asserted
like an argument without text, scream without fear.
“Dog whistles” can’t be heard by non-dogs, but they enter
the bloodstream as the kind of anxiety we feel before
we assign it value, until that value slips into
waterfalls of impulse without feeling, promising nothing
but metaphysical excuses; it matters because it means .
But back to the lanai, where notes and sounds divorce,
losses marked less by anguish than by paperwork.
Ambient traffic sounds on a wet morning underlay
the structures of chance; our son called us just as
we spoke his name, an event hardly rising to miracle
but not to be dismissed as non-event. These disabled
miracles, or partial wonders, remind us how lucky
we are to breathe. A young man in Canada screams
every night, so no one sleeps well, and we remember
how much we wanted to scream our hurts out as if
they were plastics in the belly of an albatross, freed
by a cough’s violence to make an approximate
garage sale of the lawn; we laid out our treasures:
cups, plastic bags, little forks with and without
tines, creased fast food bags already disgorged
of their processed meals. If we find a clothes
pin, will it make a pure sound inside the portable
alleys we walk down in our suburbs, or the real ones
in Chinatown, where trash is an honorific, beside
stalls of fruits, the Buddhas that laugh behind
plate glass, stuffed animals and lei shops. Look
at nothing as if you know it and nothing will stare
back at you with an absent gaze. To be Gaza’ed
is to avoid looking straight at; in this world, we’re
all autistic, overwhelmed by the sight of another
person’s eyes, small child mourning his mother’s
cooking, image precise enough to skewer your eye.
Attend to tenderness, not premeditated cruelty.
Attend to joy, not infliction of pain.
Genuflect, if your knees do bend.
Send prayers via media mail, unsure when they’ll arrive.
Send books as prayers for a distressed catcher, forearm fractured.
No command for gratitude: it’s all being. Be grateful. It’s a state, like Kansas.
Be grateful feels like cliché, until you try it.
Have equanimity, as if it were a dog seated in a stroller, pushed down the streets of Waikiki.
Say words until they make some sense, like “inflection,” followed by “point.”
Say words like “infarction” and place your hand on your heart.
Milk those concrete details for all the abstraction they can bear.
“Abstract sensuousness” labeled the poster of a man wearing a Johnny Cash teeshirt.
He stands behind a pane of glass, as if you could buy him, along with the shirt.
One photograph that didn’t turn out was of a “tropical princess,” white manikin in a twist.
The tropical princess is but an ad for a store of that name.
If we could buy our own advertising for the brands we burn into our arms.
If we could advertise who we are, in the static and yet sentimental sense.
It matters not where you bat, you bat for us.
There are holes in the line-up the catcher fell through.
Call another up, send another down.
The administrative state defines tents as “unsafe,” demonstrations as “violent.”
When there is violence, the administrative state blames it on the peaceful ones.
If the trump trial were fiction, it would have a non-stop laugh track.
Since the trial is real, heads reel, fish at the end of a line, like punctuation.
Do fishermen fish for analogy’s sake?
Do we write to keep totalitarians at bay?
Lilith barked with the fire engine, dog siren.
Does she bark because sirens are emergency arias?
Is her bark a kind of music? How many tones in her scale?
What is the purpose of a line, but to catch at the end?
I catch your drift, said Montaigne to his pen.
I am adrift, I say to my screen.
Who’s pitching today? Oh, Sonny Gray.
The one-armed catcher’s been put away for now.
Long live the new one; may he hit and not be hit.
A tent upended
Resembles an umbrella
Stop bombing Gaza
Umbrella blows down
“Violence” is the umbrella’s
Shelter from suffering
University
Fills an entire line: police
Sweep students from lawn
As if bowling pin
Not ball made the spare: empti-
Ness of wooden lane
Echoes absolute
Absence of bicycle shields
Cracked heads on sidewalk
Came around a banyan tree, its noodle limbs. Red convertible Cadillac, white man in front passenger seat, drowsing.
At the beach’s other edge, mother monk seal and pup. In the park, a surprise wedding, even to those present. Baby comes in July.
Look to the simple words if not for clarity, then consolation. Birds still sing; tide still comes in. Nothing is still.
I had thought all consolation false, or at least fake. If fiction, then apt. Days grind us to happy dust, our sorrows.
“Too dangerous to swim” read the signs. Dangerous for the seals, perhaps. A local man wishes me a “good vacation.”
No more seal SWAT team, only yellow tape across the beach. The watchers watch trespassing human beings. No seals to be seen right now.
An exchange of vows
includes history. History includes presence, a cake made of diapers
and a tiara, pens and paper to write wishes down, but not for you.
People pet my dog; I take pictures of their hands.
How do you celebrate
presence? The teacher asks us. With balloons! With secret and yet
somehow public weddings! With joy inside of tents!
