JAMES MULHERN - POEMS

James Mulhern has published in literary journals or anthologies over one hundred times. In 2015, Mr. Mulhern was awarded a fully paid writing fellowship to Oxford University in the United Kingdom. That same year, a story was longlisted for the Fish Short Story Prize. In 2017, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His most recent novel, Give Them Unquiet Dreams, is a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2019.

The Crosswalk
​

​Today I saw a father and son
stepping onto the crosswalk.
I braked and watched them pass.
Son on father’s shoulders,
headed to the park with swings.
 
I drove on, thinking of you
and wondered why you
never lifted me and held my legs
or brought me to the swings.
But you were not that type of father.
 
Once, we built a shed together.
I heard you say at a family party years later,
“Remember when Danny and I built the shed.”
But it wasn’t my brother
who cut wood and hammered nails with you.
 
I was bothered just a bit.
I had other memories,
like when you held my hands as we knotted my tie,
how we both looked in the mirror,
and I saw myself in your face.
 
You patted my shoulders.
Someone crossed the room and paused to take a picture.
It was on the table by your coffin. Your hands on mine.
Proof that we had closeness for a moment,
and that is enough.

Copacetic
​

​The word of the day is copacetic.
I see my brother and me packing suitcases for our trip.
In the frame of the doorway my father stands.
“Everything copacetic?” he says.
One time I asked him where he learned that word.
“As a Marine,” and he told me about his service in the Korean War.
“It was tough,” he said.
 
In the end, I visited him at the hospital.
“Have some jello.” I held a spoon with a wobble of red before his face.
“Don’t want it.”
“You’ve got to eat, Dad.”
“I’m not hungry.” He pushed it away.
I sat by him from morning until shadows crossed his face.
Mostly he slept. Sometimes he asked what time it was.
I left at nine. The nurse called.
“Your father’s agitated. He wants to leave. Talking about a trip.”
“I’ll be there soon.”
 
I stand in the doorway of his hospital room.
He’s at the window,
wearing the blue bathrobe my sister gave him.
“It brings out your eyes,” she told him.
“Everything copacetic?” I say.
He turns and looks.
“It was tough,” he says.
I guide him to the bed and sleep in the chair beside him.
When I wake, I find that he has gone.
 

Dark City
​

​My only memory of you--
in the dark hallway of your Boston house,
just off the sunny kitchen.
I was two and you sixty.
Tall and thin, wispy hair, light-blue eyes
illuminated by a slant of kitchen sun.
"You don't know me?"
 
I couldn't speak,
but I understood what you meant when you rubbed my head
and walked down the shellacked hallway towards the parlor.
 
You died in your sleep a few years later.
Years of hard work behind you--
a gravedigger during the day,
hauling bags of mail onto the trains
at South Station every night.
Raising five children.
 
Close to your age now,
I visit your homestead in Ireland.
Cars whizz by where once was a dirt road.
No one lives in the tiny stone house.
 
I hear birdsong and smell cut grass.
The air is cool and damp.
Sheep amble in the fields.
The sun moves into clouds,
and then lightness comes again.
 
What were you thinking as you exited this door?
How conflicted you must have felt.
Twenty-one-years-old, off to America,
leaving nine siblings and parents behind,
knowing you would never see them again.
 
From Athlone on the Shannon River, dead center of Ireland,
you walked and somehow made it to Southampton, England,
where you boarded the ship Adriatic, a word that means "dark city."
 
You knew no one in the promised land of your imagination,
but you had courage and a dream.
Just a few belongings, I'm sure, and not much money.
Mostly you had hope.

​I press my palm against the stone wall,
just as you touched my head so many years ago.
I see you move from light into darkness and beyond

Catherine
​

​When Mom and I arrived, you hid the donut behind the picture.
You sat in the sunny kitchen, embarrassed that you'd been caught with a sweet.
My mother tsk-tsked as you deflected our attention to the old photograph,
gray and yellowed, like your sagging skin.
 
I stared at the image—a girl wading in the ocean not far from the shore.
"That's me." You pointed to your former self, wearing a bathing suit like a dress.
Your stockings rolled, you pushed dark water aside to reach a boulder
in the crashing waves and foam.
 
I moved closer to inspect. I smelled sweat from your large body.
"Did you sit on the rock when you reached it? Was it fun?"
My mother rummaged around us, putting dirty plates in the sink,
running water in the basin.
 
You laughed, then held your pudgy hand against your cheek.
"I was gathering food for dinner. Sea lettuce is what we called it.
We scraped the rocks and made stew. 'Twas the food we needed,
but it was good and we were happy."
 
"Time for your bath." My mother put her arm under yours.
"Jimmy, help your grandmother up." I wrapped myself around your back, pressing into your soft flesh. "Up you go. On the count of three. One, two, three," she said.
You moaned and breathed deeply as we lifted.
 
When we reached the bathroom, my mother said she'd take it from here.
"That was Clew Bay in County Mayo," you told me before the door shut.
As she eased you into the warm bath, I listened to my mother scold you--
your diabetes and hiding the donut.
 
She blathered on about your eating habits and hygiene.
Silent, except for sighs as she sponged your back,
you were three thousand miles away, walking into the sea.
The water was colder, but its sweet memory was all you needed.

Piano
​

On that gray day, you chopped the grand piano with an ax.
Surrounded by yellow and red leaves on the hard earth,
you raised your arm to smash it all apart.
 
I could only wonder. You were a man raised to think
crying was weak. Strength and power should define you.
Men like you could not voice their secrets or despair.
 
You shattered the instrument, exorcising its shiny veneer.
Resin-impregnated paper, dovetail joints, wooden ribs,
and polished mahogany scattered around you.
 
Slowly the curved outline of the piano became a ragged mess.
The soundboard heart cracked. Small planks of air-dried wood
joined the miscellany of strings, keys, and padded hammers.
 
I thought of my mother, the day she moved out,
how you changed the locks and emptied every closet,
destroying each vestige of your shared lives.
 
If I had left the window to join you outside,
I would have seen your tears,
glistening strings on the soundboard of a broken soul.