I. The Architecture of the Sequence
The title is doing structural work, not decorative work. A crossing is a threshold event — a passage from one state to another — and the collection is arranged as a series of them: from childhood to knowledge, from health to illness, from presence to absence, from darkness toward light. The book opens in a domestic interior with “Copacetic,” a poem whose central gesture is a refusal (“I’m not hungry.” He pushed it away), and closes, before the epilogue, with “Moving Forward,” whose central gesture is an offering: “I place my arm under hers. / She stands, / kisses my forehead.” That is the arc of the book in miniature — from the plate pushed away to the hand extended.
Between those poles the sequence moves less by narrative than by pressure. Poems of family illness and decline (“Water,” “Last Supper,” “Fragility,” “The Teapot”) are set against poems of institutional life and vocation (“Longing,” “Session’s End,” “The Guard”), and against a small number of poems whose register is deliberately lighter (“Simply Silly,” “Carol”). The lighter poems are not filler; they function as pressure valves, and their placement is one of the more sophisticated things about the manuscript. A collection this concerned with grief needs air, and the sequencing supplies it at roughly the intervals a reader can bear.
The one structural risk is that the book’s emotional center of gravity sits in its middle third, where the illness poems cluster most densely. A reader arriving at “Water” has already absorbed a good deal; the poem is strong enough to survive the position, but the surrounding poems bear more weight than they otherwise would.
II. The Recurring Vocabulary
Four image systems govern the collection: hands, water, thresholds (doors, crosswalks, stairs), and light against darkness. They recur so consistently that recurrence has to be treated as method rather than habit — and the poet has been explicit that it is method. The repetitions are purposeful: the same truths set down again in new hands, new voices, new incarnations. What looks like repetition is recurrence, and recurrence is the argument.
The hands are the collection’s most reliable instrument. They appear as evidence (“Your hands on my shoulders. / One moment, framed.” in “The Crosswalk”), as failed reach (“He bends, / cupping his hands / toward the lake below, / reaching for water / that will not rise” in “Water”), and finally as tenderness offered directly (“I place my arm under hers” in “Moving Forward”). Because the poet declines to gloss them, the hands accumulate meaning by position rather than by statement — the reader learns what a cupped hand signifies in this book the way one learns a word from repeated context.
Water carries the heavier freight. In “Water” it is the thing the old man cannot reach; the poem’s catalog of a weathered body — “weathered face, / capillaries like tributaries / on dry land” — converts a body into a drought map, so that the closing phrase, “reaching for water / that will not rise,” lands as both literal thirst and something considerably larger. The figure is doing double service, and it does not announce the second service. That restraint is the collection’s signature.
Light and darkness are the riskiest of the four, because the pairing is worn nearly smooth by use. The collection earns it in one place decisively — the closing line of “Dark City,” “I see you move from darkness into light” — where the phrase survives because the poem has spent its length refusing consolation, so the turn arrives as report rather than reassurance. Elsewhere the pairing is the collection’s most predictable move.
III. The Discipline of Restraint
The collection’s most consistent technical virtue is its refusal to explain. Its characteristic sentence is short, declarative, and slightly under-informed — it tells the reader what happened and stops before telling the reader what it meant. “Copacetic” is the clearest instance: a father’s four-word evasion, a four-word narrative clause, and no commentary. The poem trusts a reader to supply the grief.
This is harder than it looks, and it is where the manuscript most clearly separates itself from competent work. The temptation in poems of family illness is to secure the feeling with a closing statement; the poems here mostly decline. “Longing” is the exception worth noting because it declines in the opposite direction — the poem states its condition outright (“Mostly, I feel empty and small— / a space between words or a tiny font”) and then rescues the statement with a figure precise enough to justify it: “The colon at the end of an unfinished thought.” A grammatical mark standing in for a life’s incompletion is exactly the kind of image this poet finds when he is working at full strength.
Where restraint slips, it slips into a final line that interprets the poem it concludes. There are perhaps three or four such endings in the manuscript. They are not failures of feeling; they are failures of trust.
IV. Formal Command
The poems are free verse with an audible substrate of accentual-syllabic expectation, which the collection exploits locally rather than sustaining as pattern. Three devices recur with real control.
Syntactic suspension. “Water” moves through a sequence of descriptive fragments — face, capillaries, belly, ankles, skin — before the single verb of action arrives in its final movement: “He bends, / cupping his hands.” The poem holds the reader in description until the gesture finally comes, and the gesture fails.
Caesura as refusal. The collection favors two kinds of break — the line-ending dash that removes connective syntax (“The old man on the dock—”), and the hard stop after reported speech that declines elaboration. Both are deployed at moments of withheld tenderness, and the consistency suggests the device is tied to a recurring dramatic situation: the adult who will not explain.
Catalog and litany. “To Be” abandons connective syntax altogether for an asyndetic list — “the Wife of Bath’s scarlet stockings / poor Yorick’s skull / Dickinson’s sherry in the glass” — which levels literary monument and roadside debris (“a flattened sneaker on some road”) into identical syntactic weight. “Moving Forward,” at the other end, borrows the cadence of litany without adopting its apparatus. The two poems mark the collection’s formal outer limits: leveling on one side, blessing on the other.
Lineation is the element most uneven across the manuscript. The strongest poems break where breaking creates meaning; a handful break where the sentence happened to run out of room.
V. A Note on a Possible Illustrated Edition
The published edition of Crossings: Selected Poems is text-only. A separately planned illustrated edition, should it go forward, raises a genuine question of proportion rather than a question of taste. This is a collection whose method is withholding — it works by declining to interpret its own images. Illustration is, by nature, an interpretation. Set carelessly, a picture of a cupped hand on the page facing “Water” would perform exactly the gloss the poem spent nine lines refusing to perform.
The productive path is the one the poems themselves take: suggestion over statement. Illustration that stays tonal — light, surface, weather, the grain of an interior — will extend the book’s atmosphere without closing its images. Illustration that renders the literal object at the poem’s center will compete with the poem and win, which is a loss. The safest structural solution is to illustrate the thresholds rather than the figures: doorways, crosswalks, stairwells, the surface of water, the room after someone has left it. Those images are the collection’s architecture, and they can be drawn without being explained.
Four poems discussed elsewhere in this essay — “Longing,” “The Guard,” “To Be,” and “Simply Silly” — belong to the fuller manuscript rather than the published Selected Poems. Mulhern reserved them, along with the rest of the expanded sequence, for this future illustrated edition, where a larger page count and visual apparatus give him more room than the tighter, cohesion-driven published selection allowed. Readers curious about them can find the full text of every poem discussed in this essay on the Complete Collection page.