J.B. Mulligan
urban castaway
A blue-suited black man leans against
the shelter of a sagged mesh fence
that cups him in the morning wind
and imprints rows of diamonds in the skin
of his back and ass. He gently sways,
a palm in an imagined breeze
on the island of his shipwrecked past:
a horror story looking for its ghost.
His red-webbed eyes stare down the street
like soldiers watching their retreat
through bombs and blood and wintry mud
congealing to a landscape where the road
is borderless, and stretches up
in all directions to the lip
of mute horizons shouldering skies
of suppurating wounds and swollen bruises.
Too stunned to move, too strong to fall,
he clings to cliffside, barren, gnarled,
as roots of a vanished childhood dangle
above the void, to shape this tenuous angle.
Or as the urban ocean swells
and tosses, he maneuvers sails
and rudder, leans against the storm -
and dreams perhaps of islands lit and warm
where breeze is soft across his skin
as a maiden's hair, and wandering vines
bear juice-fat fruit, and water pools
beneath the gently flowing waterfalls,
a day of sunlight, smiles and rest,
of catching fish for the coming feast,
and always at the end of it,
the fish hangs numb and wide-eyed in his net.
like Escher's birds
Like Escher's birds, all bordered space is full
with identical life. (The universe next door
wishes it were here.) The magic well
exchanges heady drafts of pure cold air
twixt inner and outer skies; the mouth is the cup,
and neither can contain nor be filled up.
(Kisses rush from every here to there.)
Lines are drawn that mimic ideas of line.
The swerve of matter curls around the handle,
a topologic twin: we lift the candle
to the light: a mirror's two-dimensioned plane
expands like breath to a swelling, snowy ball:
the image blurs, and clarifies the skin
that separates and joins the one and all.
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