| BRIGHDE MULLINS |
| Water Stories | |
| 2003 |
| "Brighde
Mullins' Water Stories is a stunning collection of poems, dangerous,
difficult, and fiercely alive. These poems pull us down below the surface
of things until we find ourselves almost intolerably submerged, then they
release us to a life that is changed for having read them. She retrieves
content from a line drawing snatched out of a dumpster, the deadly ennui
of a lonely afternoon, a purple sequined blues singer, a family, her own,
falling through letters, boxes, lakeweed and generations. Brighde Mullins'
debut collection places her at the very forefront of the new voices in American
poetry." —Sapphire |
City Beach
I
like that it is winter. That you are here.
The gray mist tendrils are whale
spouts, Land’s
End contracts if you stop, if you watch.
And what about these basic bricks:
breath,
flesh,
random circumstance? In the dictionary
meaning coils beneath words, hundred
becomes heart
eventually. It takes years, but it becomes, it
carries its prior, its fossil,
its trace.
The
fecundity of this random beach is borne
out in what it makes you recall: on
the tip
of your
tongue, from your heart. Still, you’d
rather have a drink than a walk, prefer
neon
to sunset, have said so. A sea-lion
wrapped in tree gnarl rots where she was
drowned
in mid-air.
“Your tender parts will be up, as
they say,” the Russian master droned. I
remind
you of
that, I imitate his cough. But you don’t
laugh.Walking with you in Manhattan
was the same,
the
Chrysler building’s chiseled silver fins
glistened in the city air, then the
descent
to the
Oyster Bar buried beneath Grand Central
Station, surface around depth, an
echo,
then the
first drink of the evening,
then the mutual clawing at air.