Author Archives: Wendy

Cricket in a Grass Cage

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I turned on the light and went into the cold room, closing the door behind me.  I opened the sliding closet door and, on my knees, began to take the shoes off the plastic box.  Why, I asked myself, do you keep your writings in a box that is so hard to get to, and whose lid is so hard to open – as I wrestled with the tightly snapped-on plastic.  
I was looking for a poem I wrote in high school.  I remembered most of it, and remembered writing it, how the phrase “cricket in a grass cage,” had just come to mind, and how the words had effortlessly unfolded from there, revealing their story.  I was thinking about how, though the sentiment wasn’t one I had striven to express, it seemed true enough at the time.  And how, though I hadn’t acknowledged it then, the poem was probably influenced by Dylan Thomas’ “Fern Hill,” a poem my mother loved and had shared with me.
The copy that I found was one I had prepared to submit for publication, and I had changed some words from the ones I remembered, and had left out a stanza to make it more taut (so I thought).  But the missing stanza was one that, for me, drove the rhythm and feeling of the poem, and left its strong mark on my memory, so I put it back.  
The poem has the sensibilities of a high school student, but I still like it.
Cricket in a Grass Cage
Before myself, we used to fly
And walk life’s mountain paths
Our step was sure and we were strong
And we could see forever
There was no limit
All we knew was hinder-free
High bouncing or whatever
In a never-time or instant
Life was sweet – we learned to sing its song
In timeless – free and easy – laughter
And in tender caring, tears
With joy and softly knowing, never fears
But slowly or with crashing 
Came myself, and I am here
And time was thrust upon a soul
And ticking limits hold my flight
They measure out the tune
All is chained except the spirit
And I am here
With no free movement very far
With no free will to go or stay
So little to express my being
With only me to say I am.
And so I sing my song
Like a cricket in a grass cage
With all the glory of the meadow
Confined in this precise bamboo.


©Wendy Mulhern
Spring, 1974


Innocence

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Writing in my journal today, I paused, and wrote, “incite insight” – just a sentence that came to mind.  It reminded me of a set of poems I wrote in college, around the time of my first love.
I keep the poems on an index card in a once-white plastic file box which contains my recipes.  After desserts there’s a tab that says “linguists’ assertions”, and contains quotes about various kinds of presuppositions.  The tab after that is blank, and behind it are poems, and pep talks to myself.  The first poem of the set is missing, but no matter – I know it by heart.
Innocence
I
Innocence
In a sense
Unwarned, in love encaptured
Unaware how not to care
In loving arms enwrapped
Enraptured.
II.
Innocence
In essence
A warming concord captured
Well aware how much we care
As Love holds us enwrapped
Enraptured.
III.
Innocence
In us, sense
To see our source of rapture
The wonder of untrammeled love
That trust makes us so apt
To capture.


©Wendy Mulhern
-Spring, 1980 (I think)

Saturday Afternoon, at the Laughing Ladies Cafe

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In our quiet corner of the world
The snow comes down, the furnace clicks
The wheels of commerce hum and purr
Folks with laptops smile and think and type
Espresso maker whines and thrums
Across the world, a short mouse click away
The streets are full, in history’s heady making
The breathless edge of life sharpens the day
As destiny hangs low, ripe for the taking
We sip our mochas, read the news
Do homework, glance out at each other
Confront our daily challenges, pace through duties
Instruct our children, check in on our friends
Buy gasoline, keep warm, wait for spring
Across the world, powers make their play
Wills pull taut, old expectations breaking
How dare they ask? – How could they not?  Today
In rippled flows like childbirth, youth is waking.


©Wendy Mulhern
February 26, 2011



Seeking to be Under the Influence

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“I hate poetry,” my son said to me today.  “Everyone does.” As usual I laughed about him being the knower of everyone.  But walking back from the library, four poetry books in my bag – four from four shelves worth, chosen almost randomly – I wondered about it.  I don’t know the land of poetry, or its history – its topography, geology, political lines.  I know a few poets I like, some I love.  I know I have been influenced by poets at different times in my life, where it feels like their music gets into my blood and makes my words sing like theirs.  But I don’t know how to find more like them.  I’m thinking I need to.
I wrote the following poem in 1976, after a magical walk on a magical beach in Wales.  In my efforts to capture the occasion and how it moved me, I felt influenced by the work of Dylan Thomas.  
Aberdaron
The night is silver and lace,
lace dragging mirrors
down to the sea
back to the black deep etched in foam
laced in swirling form
silver in its dance for the ruling moon.
Mirrors glint and recede –
the lace comes again to the shore
to cast them
and drag them slowly back as they
reflect the sky.
as sand reflects sky
the sky reflects sea
clouds reflect the foam
the depth of the sea reflects the moon.
The black islands say nothing, though the moon
is riding in a violet-blue carriage surrounded by rainbow
The dull, humble textured cliffs watch
while tousled clouds walk lofty
lost
in reverie
floating in a cave of wind.
Silent in the darkness
a stone
is smooth and black
with a white ring of lace around it.


©Wendy Mulhern
Late Fall, 1976


White Space

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I didn’t listen to myself last night when I said, save one of those poems for tomorrow.  Ah, I thought, I’ll have something new for then.  I thought about the same things today – developments in the Middle East, what makes something poetry.  I worked on revising my novel.  I wondered about ways I might get the feedback I crave, the dialog I long for. I watched snow coming down.
I’m trying to post every day.  What does it matter if no one even looks?

(I left the space white overnight, but then crept in to add the following:)

No need to fight too hard 
against the white space
it’s not a tight space
it’s something unconfined
Consider it a wide place
a place where you might find grace
a landscape where you might trace
something divine
Try giving it a night chase
fast colors in a light race
you aren’t the only nut case
who’s so inclined
You might yet capture some trace
that maybe you can’t quite place
that leads you to your right place
your rescued mind.


©Wendy Mulhern
February 24, 2011


Politics and Poetry

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Yesterday had strange lights in it.  I sat with a group of homeless women and wrote about peace, and heard poignant tales of trauma and redemption.  I read about Libya, Yemen, and Bahrain.  I finished a poem about a vision I saw, nearing sleep.  Today I read some poetry online (looking into taking a class, trying to find the right teacher) and found much that was foreign to me.  And I read about a group of young people from Serbia who are teaching people how to successfully bring down dictators.  http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/02/16/revolution_u?page=0,1
Which engendered the following:
Political Conversion:
     Ode to CANVAS
What wins? Can empires truly crumble?
Can decades of oppression be brought down?
Perhaps they can, with methods wise and humble
the youth from Serbia have worked to spread around.
They look around and find the power areas – 
the forces to win over to their side,
In Egypt’s case, police and military,
their land as one, a people unified.
They build for years, with quiet, small successes
They grow their movement almost secretly
till when they stand, their voice can’t be suppressed:
The people claim their courage and are free.
Such wonder! That these dedicated youth
Are proving to us all the power of truth.


©Wendy Mulhern
February 22, 2011
Poetical Confusion
Some call it poetry when words are snatched
from multi-tasked attention – meaning hatched
perhaps as afterthought, upon observing
juxtapositions of their random pennings.
It may be so for them, but as for me
I crave a higher sensibility
I want to be transported by a poem
made to see and feel in ways I haven’t 
beyond the market’s dull, bombarding drone
the drift of mindless clutter on the planet
I don’t believe we can’t discern what’s true
that anything that flits through thought will do.
The culture speeds at furious velocity
I still hold out for luminosity.


©Wendy Mulhern
February 22, 2011


Prelude to a Dream

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– A quick entry before I go to bed – most house lights off, the last chore done, the heat turned down . . . 
Prelude to a Dream
Here is the color of the depth of Mind:
Not quite black – a greyish, bluish cast
The place each soul has always hoped to find
Everything said from here stands; its word will last
Mountains are moved, all rivers speak it
Northern lights’ swift shimmer shines it past
This is the place where nothing stands beneath it
No cave so deep, no shifting sea so vast
Here in the backdrop of the depth of Mind
All secrets are spelled out, their golden stamp
is illustrated, block by block, line by line
Impressed with every sacred word’s recap
Or so it seemed, as earnest dream descended
Submerging me in sleep before it ended.


©Wendy Mulhern
February 21, 2011


For Days When Progress Isn’t Obvious

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A pep talk for myself and maybe for others as well:
Ode to Patience
layer on layer, patient placing down
daily labor, each day’s small deposit
little gain as evening comes around
not much to see, but still continue placid
consider the perspective of a life
of sediment that settles under sea
of change that comes so slowly you don’t see it
as things evolve, emerging gradually.
At some time, you’ll look back, and then you’ll know
the progress that you made at your endeavor
as imperceptibly stalactites grow
stalagmites reach them, and they join together.
No need to judge or let your head hang heavy
Your work will bear its fruits when they are ready.


©Wendy Mulhern
February 18, 2010


Pause for Praise

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This morning, when the sun was streaming in the south livingroom window, and the leaded glass on the door was laying crystalline pattens across the yellow walls, I found myself wanting to commune again with the poetry of Harvey Hix.

One poem in particular stood out.  I had the urge to put it up here and say, look, isn’t this amazing? – Just the way last night, when I came off the freeway into Lynnwood and saw the moon rising over trees, orange and looking too large to embrace in both my arms, I had to call my husband and say go outside, see if you can see the moon.

I imagined the different lines of the poem and what I would say about them.  I thought of the joy the poem as a whole still brings me.  I decided to try it.  Here’s the second part of the poem:

list your desires, I’ll assert your sorrows,
glossed by geese in whose v grief is given,
the marred, moored one-note chorale they compose,
those lost children named again and again,
by the unbreakable fractal code
ferns signal not to us or to each other
but to what means mushroom, what suggests shade
and spring, the abstract will that maths feathers,
that occasions the blue-shade-layered hills,
the dread red-shouldered hawk’s shagged, haggard head,
missing moss-loosened tiles in the tunnels,
wind-washed sand-white bark-bare branches long dead
the goose-shade of clouds any breath-blue calls
the luminous fate coding me, dust-red.
     H.L. Hix
     from Legible Heavens, c. 2008

My delight pushes me beyond the lameness of talking with other words about the perfect words.  First the meaning as a whole:  this poem speaks to me of the wonder of life and the fact that its wonder is often beyond our designs – that if we desire something of our own concocting it probably will be to our sorrow, since we are designed by what designs everything, not by ourselves, and we reflect the same beautiful, fractal code that we see in everything else.

Now to the sounds: when you say out loud, “the marred, moored, one-note chorale they compose” it sounds amazingly like geese calling from the sky – try it!  (The again and again in the next line does a similar thing) And “the dread red-shouldered hawk’s shagged, haggard head”  – it’s just fun to say.  And I love the way the sometimes use of half rhymes keeps the sonnet from becoming too sing-song, but then at times the full rhyme pulls the reader into the rhythm.  So in the first four lines he has sorrows coupled with compose, the difference of accent making the rhyme subtle, and also the same relationship between given and again.  In the next four lines he has the partial rhymes of code and shade, and other and feathers. Then in the last six lines he has one set come out in clear straight rhyme – head, dead, red, which gives the poem momentum, pulling it towards its conclusion. In between are partial rhymes – hills, tunnels, calls (whose vowels progress from higher to lower in articulation).  

I believe the dust-red in the last line is a reference to the Biblical Adam, as that is the meaning of the name.

The first part of the poem, which places the second part as the then portion of an if-then sequence, lends the whole poem a certain lightness of heart, though not of meaning.  You need to read the whole thing in context – the whole poem and the whole series.  You’ll find it in Legible Heavens, to which there’s a link to the right in my blog (sorry it’s hard to see – haven’t figured out how to change that yellow color.) But you can find it there.


Song Stories

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Occasionally I will write a song that is a story – not about anything true but perhaps conveying something someone will recognize.  That is the case in the song Amber Lee.
This song was born on the night before Valentine’s Day several years ago, when I was sewing bead eyes on some little lizards I had made, from rainbow colored fleece, to be Valentine’s Day presents for my kids.  As it happened, the beads were amber.  So the line came up, with its tune: Amber Lee has amber eyes.  The rest of the words came, in bike rides over subsequent weeks, to fill in the tune.  No real person behind this – just a story that arose from lizard eyes:
Amber Lee 
has amber eyes
shining out like some bright prize
If you want to understand, you must
be wise
Amber Lee,
what satisfies you?
Amber Lee
has honey hair
shot with gold like some deep prayer
if you want to go within, you must
be there
Amber Lee, 
what makes you care?
Amber Lee
has limbs of fire
laced throughout with swift desire
all the worlds that bend to her
she could acquire
Amber Lee,
what takes you higher?





©Wendy Mulhern