John Mulrooney is a poet, filmmaker and musician living in Cambridge, MA. He is author of If You See Something, Say Something from the Anchorite Press and co-producer of the documentary ‘The Peacemaker’, from Central Square Films. He records and performs regularly with a number of groups in the greater Boston area. He is Associate Professor in the English Department at Bridgewater State University. His work has appeared in Fulcrum, Pressed Wafer fold’em zine, Solstice, The Battersea Review, Poetry Northeast, Spoke, Let the Bucket Down and others.

 

At the Brooklyn Promenade

 

Blue clouds of the dusk sky

shimmer on the surface of the harbor;

placemats of blue lace on a bluer table,

and then shift back to something more

cloudlike; something less, being only

the things that they are, and reflections at that.

And what of it.  All day

sorting a crate of our recent past

which cannot go away

fast enough, dividing stacks

of almost identical diagnosis attempts,

a hundred pages of the unsaid,

layered blue of MRI prints –

a series of study sketches

toward an unfinished work.

This park is the triumph of making,

a template for Sunday afternoons

where I had guided her slowly,

so careful as to be clumsy,

along the promenade to sit

on a bench under Brooklyn Bridge,

its vast arc the manifest perfected

sum of some quantifiable knowledge,

because it was something she could do,

just to get out for a while.

Today, a man photographs

the cobbles along the walkway

littered with cellophane and

pink strands from a feather boa,

a newspaper soggy with urine,

its letters running like mascara;

these are all this day alone,

against the irreducible sky

and the splendor of structure;

what the wind has done

to make this day particular.

And these shapes changing

on the water like like or as

are not even, cannot be what I sing

because memory is death; it kills the things

you cherish or dread and replaces

each one with your memory of it:

a hollowness built of the real.

And suddenly it was almost me who

could not walk to a bench by the bridge,

although it never was,                                                

although my arms and legs

obey my commands,

do what I tell them but never what I want:

wrong and helpless,

I span one to the other

because all I can do is identify

make myself metaphor,

a thing that might look like,

that you think is but isn’t.

And I want to dive,

that marriage of plummet and jump,

in below the refracted sky,

to the water’s silence

and come out on the surface

that might make me one of

these changing things I cannot change,

which will erase my clumsiness

and redraw me as shimmer.

 

~

Autumn Walk After Jodorowsky

 

More métier en scene

than inchoate vagabond

some summer in the knees

some summer in green

 

and of course in the water

were protean secrets,

the day and clock pulse

still too small to retain

 

an atmosphere true but

in the forge of gravity

The Empress of autumn

sought the star, summer

 

plunged below and yellow

irises found hiding spots

and our eyes seeking them

confirmed that we all sought

 

the commensal beauty

and usefulness therein –

big fish and little fish

bandicoot and boa –

 

blood is protein knowledge

on autumn’s whistle stop

or winter’s all aboard,

but summer yes she bleeds –

 

rats and racoons wreak

havoc around her feet

cluttered under composts

of spring that winter nicked.

 

~

Poem on Madonna’s 50th Birthday

 

here is August soaked with reminder

that the world is material that changes

 

there’s a flag at half mast

for someone who didn’t even make the papers

 

the rainy season comes upon us

like it was the tropics like the

 

flutters and hums on Bleeker

were south beach waves and breezes

 

the flutters and hums on Bleeker

that becomes a material that changes

 

Paparazzi armies lay siege to the ineffable

dumpy men made of rain

 

make glimmer solid in a flashbulb

and Elvis Presley 31 years dead

 

waits with us to reinsert mystery

into the material substance of our lives

 

says with us we ache we ache we ache

comes to love us

 

as we come to love ourselves

by waiting upon those

 

we desire to both want and be

until memory strikes a pose

 

and crosses over the borderline

of our love.