Crossings at Twenty Poems

I. Reading the Collection as an Arc, Not an Anthology

“Mapped in Water and Bone,” already part of this series, reads Crossings thematically — water, hands, light and dark, Catholic imagery, the influence of Heaney, Yeats, Oliver, and Dickinson. This essay asks a different question: not what the poems are about, but what order they come in, and what that order does that a thematic reading cannot capture. The current twenty-poem sequence — from “A Prayer” through “Leaves” — is not an alphabetized or randomly assembled gathering of Mulhern’s best individual poems; it has a legible shape, moving from inheritance and arrival, through the losses of a single extended family, to a closing movement that explicitly juxtaposes new life against unresolved grief. Reading the collection as a sequence rather than as an anthology reveals a structural logic that argues, silently, for a specific way of understanding grief: not as a wound that closes, but as a crossing that is never completed.

II. Opening the Book at the Water’s Edge

The collection’s title announces its organizing image before a single poem is read, and the sequence’s second poem, “Dark City,” makes the crossing literal rather than metaphorical: it recounts a grandfather’s emigration from “Athlone on the Shannon River, / dead center of Ireland” to Southampton, where he “boarded the Adriatic, / a name that means, ’dark city.’”¹ The poem’s closing gesture — “I see you move from darkness into light” — establishes, at the very front of the book, the collection’s basic vocabulary: crossing as movement from dark to light, undertaken at cost (“Hardly any money”), carrying only “a canvas sack, your mother’s Bible.” Every later crossing in the collection — a bath, a plane’s turbulence, a grave — will be measured, whether the poems say so explicitly or not, against this founding Atlantic crossing: a passage that cannot be undone, made once, by someone who did not live to see the grandchild now writing the poem.

III. The Middle Movement: Bodies in Decline, Hands in Service

The collection’s middle stretch — “The Crosswalk,” “Piano,” “Last Supper,” “She Knelt,” “We’d Scrape the Rocks,” “Shoes,” “Honeymoon” — is organized around a recurring physical situation rather than a recurring image: an adult speaker attending to the failing body of an elder, hands doing the work love no longer has words for. “Honeymoon” states this pairing of tenderness and time explicitly, moving from a foot rubbed with ointment to a photograph of a young couple who “could be my children,” closing on “the tenderness at the bottom of her sole” and “the aching tenderness of her soul”² — the pun on sole/soul is not incidental wordplay but the poem’s whole argument compressed into a homophone, body and spirit tended by the same gesture. “We’d Scrape the Rocks” extends this care into an explicitly ritual register — a grandson called to help lift his grandmother into a bath — while “Shoes” moves the same gesture back a further generation, tracing hand-me-down shoes from a great-grandmother who “cleaned houses for the rich” down through a chain of women’s feet.³ Placed in sequence rather than read in isolation, these poems build a cumulative argument that care in this family is transmitted the way the Atlantic crossing was transmitted — physically, hand to hand, body to body, with no guarantee that the person receiving the care can fully repay or even understand it at the time.

IV. “Brother Mark” and “Brother Mike”: A Diptych of Loss Placed Deliberately Together

The sequence positions its two brother-elegies back to back, a choice that cannot be accidental in a twenty-poem book this carefully assembled. “Brother Mark” closes on a wish to freeze time — “Our time together — / perpetually that night” — a refusal to let the elegized moment become past tense.⁴ Placed immediately after it, “Brother Mike” and the poems that follow (“Please Call Me,” “The Teapot,” “Carol”) extend the collection’s grief work into estrangement and unanswered longing rather than death alone — “I no longer know you… I long to hear your voice”⁴ voices a loss that has no funeral to mark it, no casket to frame a final image, only an ongoing, unresolved absence. Reading the two brother poems as a deliberate pair reveals the collection distinguishing between two species of loss it wants to keep formally separate: death, which at least closes a specific date, and estrangement, which does not close at all — a distinction the sequence draws through placement rather than through any poem stating it directly.

V. The Closing Movement: New Life Set Against the Grave

The collection’s final four poems — “The Nest,” “Turbulence,” “Water,” “Leaves” — perform the sequence’s most deliberate structural argument, and their order matters enormously. “The Nest” ends the collection’s penultimate stretch on an image of imminent birth and hope, a body cast recovering while robins hatch outside the window, closing on the imagined moment “you’ll walk outside again… searching the blue, hoping to glimpse a fledgling.”⁵ “Turbulence” immediately follows with the collection’s most explicit meditation on the speaker’s own aging and mortality — a plane’s rattling passage read as an image of the entire human span, “Behind: everything lived. / Ahead: the solid blackness.”⁵ “Water” then strips the collection’s title image down to its barest, most desolate form: an old man on a dock “reaching for water / that will not rise,”⁵ water now withheld rather than crossed, a crossing that has failed. And “Leaves,” the collection’s final poem, ends not in acceptance but in an imagined voice at a graveside — “’We’re done,’ you whisper in my ear… You’re no longer here. / I stand and leave”⁵ — a closing line whose pun on “leaves” (the noun that names the poem’s central image and the verb that ends it) enacts, formally, the departure the poem describes. The book does not end on resolution; it ends on a leave-taking that echoes, in miniature, the founding Atlantic crossing of “Dark City” — another departure from a fixed point toward an unknown, unaccompanied elsewhere.

VI. Conclusion: The Collection as a Single Extended Crossing

Read end to end, Crossings is not a set of twenty discrete meditations on death, family, and water loosely unified by recurring images — it is a single structural argument, executed across a deliberate sequence, that crossing is the family’s inherited condition rather than an occasional event. The grandfather crosses an ocean; the grandchildren cross into caretaking roles their bodies were not prepared for; brothers cross into death or into silence; and the book’s final image is of a speaker crossing away from a grave, alone, having been told by an imagined voice that the work of grief, like the work of raking leaves, is “done” — a claim the poem’s own tears immediately complicate. The collection’s title, read structurally rather than thematically, names not a single event repeated in variation but a continuous condition: to be a member of this family, in this book, is to be always mid-crossing, never quite arrived.

— Silver Current Press

Notes

Works Quoted

All Essays Mapped in Water and Bone