The Poetics of Crossings — The Complete Study

Abstract

Crossings, the unpublished chapbook manuscript by James Mulhern, gathers twenty-seven poems and a closing epilogue into a single sustained meditation on threshold—the literal and figural crossing that gives the book its title. This study reads the collection as a work of domestic elegy in the tradition Peter Sacks describes in The English Elegy, in which grief is not simply expressed but formally “worked through” by an inherited set of poetic conventions (Sacks 1–2)¹. It argues that Crossings builds its elegiac work from four recurring materials—water, touch, domestic objects, and the threshold of light and dark—deployed with the discipline T.S. Eliot called the “objective correlative”: a “set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion” (Eliot, qtd. in Poetry Foundation)². The analysis proceeds thematically rather than sequentially, considering every poem in the collection against six critical frames: liminality and rites of passage (Van Gennep, Turner); the objective correlative and imagist compression; the grammar of touch as a substitute for withheld speech; Bachelard’s phenomenology of the house and its objects; the formal devices of enjambment, apostrophe, and the volta; and the collection’s late turn toward civic and ethical witness. The study closes by proposing that the volume’s own ars poetica—“my poems are my prayers”—asks to be read literally: Crossings is less a record of grief than a devotional practice conducted in verse.

I. The Threshold as Controlling Trope

The book’s title announces its method before the first poem begins. A crossing, in the anthropological sense established by Arnold van Gennep and extended by Victor Turner, is not a single instant but a three-part structure: separation, margin (or limen, Latin for threshold), and reaggregation, with the middle stage marking a person as “betwixt and between,” belonging fully to neither the state left behind nor the one not yet entered (Turner, qtd. in Kelly)³. Mulhern’s poems return obsessively to this middle stage, and specifically to the physical architecture of thresholds—doorways, hallways, crosswalks, airplane cabins—as the site where the emotional weight of the book accumulates.

“Dark City” stages the structure most explicitly. The poem’s grandfather is remembered first in a doorway (“My only memory of you—/ in the dark hallway of your Boston house”) and then, in the poem’s second half, at the literal doorway of his emigration from Ireland: “What were you thinking / as you exited this door?” The poem’s final image completes the rite-of-passage structure by naming all three of its stages in six words: “I see you move from darkness / into brightness, / and beyond.” Separation (darkness), margin (the doorway itself, held in suspension across the stanza break), and reaggregation (brightness, and what lies beyond it) are compressed into a single continuous motion, and the ship that carries him—the Adriatic, “a name that means ‘dark city’”—makes the crossing literal as well as figural: a nineteenth-century Irish emigrant ship named, by historical accident, for the very darkness the poem asks him to leave behind.

The same structure governs poems that never leave Philadelphia or Boston. “Brother Mark” sets its central scene beneath a bridge—itself an architecture of crossing—and frames the fire the brothers build as a temporary limen they are reluctant to leave: “Soon, we’d leave this tunnel, / step into the whiteness beyond. / But now, I loved the circle / of our fire and our shared song.” The poem’s closing wish—“I wish we had stayed / in our sacred space”—names the liminal zone itself, not the world on either side of it, as the site of desire, an inversion of the rite-of-passage structure’s usual logic that the margin exists to be passed through rather than inhabited. “The Crosswalk” performs a smaller, everyday version of the same crossing—a father and son stepping off a curb—and uses it to measure, by contrast, a crossing the speaker’s own father never made: the poem’s closing image of “your hands over mine” is a threshold gesture recovered only at a coffin, arriving, like the rite of passage itself, too late to be anything but reaggregation into absence. “Turbulence” relocates the threshold to an airplane cabin at altitude, where “solid blackness” outside the window becomes a figure for the crossing every aging body is making, whether or not it names itself that way: “I knew what lay behind me. / I knew what lay ahead.”

II. The Objective Correlative and the Discipline of the Image

Eliot’s 1919 essay on Hamlet proposes that emotion in art cannot be stated directly; it must be lodged in “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events” that, once given, makes the emotion “immediately evoked” in the reader without further comment from the poet (Eliot, qtd. in Poetry Foundation)². Crossings is built almost entirely on this principle, and its most concentrated demonstration is the poem “Water,” which never once names the emotion it produces. The poem is a catalog of a dying man’s body—“flaccid face,” “broken capillaries / like tributaries on arid land,” “purple ankles”—that arrives, without transition or commentary, at its final image: “On the dock, / hands cupped, / bending— / Toward water / he’ll never reach.” The poem’s entire emotional argument is delivered by that image alone; grief, longing, and the cruelty of a body that has become the very element it can no longer touch are all “immediately evoked” by the objective fact of cupped hands and unreachable water, in exactly the mechanism Eliot describes.

The same discipline governs “Fragility,” in which a grandmother’s stoicism is rendered entirely through inventory—“a dirt-floor house,” “a mile to a well,” “a bed with two siblings / and a few fire-warmed bricks”—set in silent contrast against the poem’s framing scene of a modern meeting derailed by a single hurt feeling. The poem never states its argument about generational endurance; it only lists the objects that constitute one, and lets the list argue by accumulation, a technique closely related to what the early twentieth-century Imagist movement called treating “the thing… directly, whether subjective or objective,” relying on “the resonance of concrete images drawn in precise, colloquial language rather than traditional poetic diction” (Poetry Foundation, “Imagism”)⁴. “Catherine” extends the same method into a longer narrative frame, using a single recovered object—a hidden donut, an old photograph of a girl wading into the Atlantic—to carry the poem’s entire argument about diminishment and the persistence of an interior life the present tense can no longer see: “Cold waves struck your skin, / but the sweet memory of the sea / was all you needed.” “The Nest,” similarly, correlates a body confined by a surgical cast with a robins’ nest observed from a sickroom window, letting the birds’ hatching stand in, without ever saying so, for the patient’s own suspended hope of walking again.

III. The Grammar of Touch

Where the collection’s men in particular are shown withholding speech—“Men like you couldn’t voice / their secrets or despair,” the speaker says of his father in “Piano”—touch becomes the volume’s substitute language, and it is applied with a consistency across poems that amounts to a private theology of the hand. “The Crosswalk” isolates the gesture with surgical precision: a father’s hands positioned over a son’s to knot a tie, recovered only in a funeral photograph found “on the table by your coffin”—“proof that we had closeness / for a moment in time.” “Brother Mike” relocates the same grammar into an explicitly sacramental register: a brother who cannot offer verbal advice instead “crossed himself / in the dashboard light,” an act the poem names outright as communion—“Communion is the road we share”—without a priest, an altar, or a single spoken word.

The volume’s late poems of caregiving extend this grammar into the register of the body in physical decline. “Honeymoon” and “Shoes” both stage an adult child tending a mother’s feet—rubbing ointment into a heel, easing a foot into a shoe over crooked toes—and in both poems the tending becomes a wordless answer to a question the poem never states aloud. “Moving Forward” widens the same gesture to its furthest reach, moving from a dying dog (“I injected insulin into my dog”) to a declining mother (“I place my arm under hers / to help her stand”) to a hypothetical future in which the poem imagines its own hand being touched from beyond death: “I’ll feel her fingers / softly trace my face.” “Please Call Me” measures the same grammar by its absence, mourning not a death but the slow attrition of a brotherly intimacy once carried entirely by voice—“I miss the avocado-green rotary phone”—now reduced to text messages the poem treats as a debased, touchless communion: “Now you text— / ‘Thinking of you,’ / with emojis or a pic.” Even “Last Supper,” the volume’s most explicitly sacramental title, resolves its central grief not through the ritual meal its title invokes but through a wife’s wordless hand on a shoulder: “She touched his shoulder.” The poem’s closing insistence that “words / could not relieve his pain” states, as a kind of thesis, the principle every touch-poem in the collection enacts without saying.

IV. Domestic Objects and the Poetics of Space

Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space argues that the house and its contents are not merely a setting for memory but its active machinery: “the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer”—memories are “housed,” and the more elaborate the house, the more clearly delineated the refuges memory can retreat into (Bachelard, qtd. in Double Operative)⁵. Crossings repeatedly locates its griefs inside a single domestic object rather than a room, but the mechanism is Bachelard’s: an object becomes a chamber that a whole vanished order of family life can still be shown to occupy. “The Teapot” is the clearest instance—a misplaced “gold-trimmed porcelain” teapot becomes, once found, the exact vessel of an entire remembered Christmas: the mahogany table, Streisand’s album, a grandmother’s Irish grace (“these thy gifts”), and every sibling’s distinct habit of attention or distraction at that one table. The poem’s closing turn to “Christ’s bounty received, / blessings I revere” makes explicit what Bachelard’s theory implies about domestic objects generally: the teapot is not a symbol of the meal but a literal container of it, still full.

“Piano” inverts the same logic, using an object’s violent destruction rather than its recovery to expose what it had been housing. The father’s axe does not merely break an instrument; it exposes, piece by piece—“wooden ribs, dovetail joints, / padded hammers, strings”—an anatomy the poem insists on reading as the man’s own interior, ending on the possibility of “your tears— / glistening strings / on the soundboard of a broken soul.” The piano, like Bachelard’s house, had been sheltering something; its dismantling is the only occasion on which that shelter becomes visible. “To Be,” finally, generalizes the entire principle into a formal structure: a bare catalog of borrowed objects—“the Wife of Bath’s scarlet stockings,” “poor Yorick’s skull,” “a lost sock under a sagging couch,” “a crow’s feather on a deck”—offered with no connective argument at all, as if the poem were testing how much emotional weight the bare imagist catalog, unassisted by narrative, can still carry. Its final turn to “that dried leaf / you crumble in your hand” answers the question by returning, one last time, to the grammar of touch that governs the rest of the book.

V. Elegy, Apostrophe, and the Work of Mourning

Peter Sacks’s foundational study defines the elegy not as a static record of loss but as an “event or action”—the working-through, in Freud’s phrase, of mourning, achieved partly through the repetitions and refrains that “control the expression of grief while also keeping that expression in motion” (Sacks 1, 18)¹. Crossings supplies its own refrain in “Copacetic,” the collection’s opening poem, whose title word is asked, answered, and finally withheld across the poem’s length: a father’s habitual, almost liturgical question—“Everything copacetic?”—is repeated at his deathbed, answered once honestly (“It was tough”), and then permanently silenced: “At dawn, he was gone.” The word returns once more in the book’s dedication (“Everything is copacetic. / As copacetic as it gets”), converting a private family idiom into exactly the kind of ritual refrain Sacks identifies as elegy’s oldest technical resource.

“Leaves” performs elegy’s characteristic collapse of two time frames into a single repeated gesture and phrase. Raking leaves with a living brother (“‘Not yet,’ you said”) and kneeling at that brother’s grave years later (“‘We’re done,’ you whisper in my ear”) are fused by the identical closing gesture—“I should leave, / I think, / but not yet”—so that the earlier scene’s ordinary reluctance to finish a chore becomes, retroactively, an elegy for a mortality neither speaker could have named at the time. This is apostrophe in the technical sense codified by the Academy of American Poets: “a direct address of an inanimate object, abstract qualities, a god, or a person not living or present” (Poets.org)⁶—the poem speaks to the dead brother as though the address itself could be answered, and the poem’s closing line lets the reader hear that answer arrive. “Carol” deploys apostrophe more overtly still, addressing a living aunt in the present tense (“Now you’re eighty-one, / and I’m fifty-nine”) while grammatically rehearsing her eventual loss, an anticipatory elegy for someone not yet gone—a mode Sacks would recognize as mourning’s work beginning before its occasion has technically arrived. The volume’s Epilogue closes the elegiac frame explicitly, pairing Carl Jung’s “If we are not true to who we are, have we lived?” with Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Our lives begin to end the day / we become silent about things that matter”—two epigraphs that convert the whole preceding sequence of private griefs into a stated argument about the cost of unspoken feeling, the same cost every poem in the collection has been quietly measuring.

VI. Form: Enjambment, the Volta, and Compression

The collection’s free verse relies heavily on enjambment—“the running-over of a sentence or phrase from one poetic line to the next, without terminal punctuation” (Poetry Foundation, “Enjambment”)⁷—not as ornament but as a mimetic device that stages hesitation and withheld disclosure at the level of the line. “Water”’s final stanza is the clearest case: “On the dock, / hands cupped, / bending— / Toward water / he’ll never reach” delays the poem’s single verb of futility (“never reach”) across four line breaks, so that the reader’s own reading experience physically enacts the reaching-and-not-arriving the poem describes. This practice is consistent with what Denise Levertov calls “organic form,” in which “units of awareness” determine the length of lines and stanzas and “the measure is the direct expression of the movement of perception” rather than a received metrical scheme (Levertov, qtd. in Poetry Foundation)⁸; Mulhern’s short, heavily enjambed lines consistently track a perception arriving in pieces rather than a sentence arriving whole.

Several poems also employ a clear volta, the “turn of thought or argument” most familiar from the sonnet but applicable, as the Poetry Foundation notes, to “any piece of writing that sets up one expectation and then shifts to another” (Poetry Foundation, “Volta”)⁹. “Carol” turns on a single dash: after several stanzas built around the image of an aunt as a lost “apostrophe” in a painting, the poem pivots—“No—my heart”—rejecting its own extended metaphor in real time and replacing loss with a “steady pulse in the light.” “Mostly I Sit” turns twice, first accepting mortality as “a sacred stillness” and then, in its final stanza, undercutting that consolation entirely: “Or maybe it’s a bluff of nothingness, / a shadowed, fraudulent shore.” The doubled volta refuses the poem the single settled resolution elegy traditionally supplies, leaving consolation and its negation standing side by side—a formal enactment of the uncertainty the poem names as its subject.

VII. Poems of Ethical Witness

A distinct cluster of poems steps outside the family frame entirely to consider the ethics of feeling itself, in the classroom and in public life. “Simply Silly” and “Longing” both examine a teacher’s own invisibility and longing to matter, poems of professional rather than familial tenderness that extend the volume’s grammar of unspoken care into institutional space. “You Hurt My Eyes” is the collection’s most direct ethical argument, staging a classroom debate over whether historical images of slavery’s violence should be taught at all—“the word ‘triggered’ lingered / in the air”—before turning, in an act of ekphrasis (the poetic description of a visual artwork, in this case a photograph), to “The Scourged Back,” the historical photograph of an enslaved man’s whip-scarred back, described in the Poetry Foundation’s glossary as a mode that lets the poet “amplify and expand” an image’s meaning through narration and reflection (Poetry Foundation, “Ekphrasis”)¹⁰. The poem’s closing rhetorical question—imagining the photograph’s unnamed subject pleading, as the students had, “You hurt my eyes”—converts the classroom’s comfort-seeking into an indictment sharpened precisely by the poem’s refusal to resolve it into a simple moral.

“For the Animals” and “Session’s End” extend the same civic attention into the register of collective crisis, both evidently written from within the 2020 pandemic’s early global stillness. “For the Animals” catalogs, in the same imagist mode as “Fragility” and “To Be,” a worldwide list of wildlife reclaiming empty cities—lions in Johannesburg, boars in Haifa, penguins in Cape Town—before closing on a line borrowed, with evident irony, from the civil rights movement: “‘Free at last, free at last,’ we say behind our masks.” “Session’s End” performs a rarer move for the collection, addressing an entire culture rather than a single relative: “The anchors stare at empty teleprompters” as the ordinary noise of news and politics falls briefly silent, replaced by “Thoreau’s wood thrush” and the natural sounds that outlast human crisis. Both poems apply the volume’s established techniques—the objective correlative, the enjambed catalog, the wordless closing image—to a subject larger than the family, suggesting that the private elegiac grammar built across the rest of the book is, in the end, portable to public grief as well.

VIII. Conclusion: The Poems as Prayer

The book’s Introduction offers what amounts to its own critical thesis before a single poem has been read: “My family members are my prayers. / My poems are my prayers. / My family members are my poems.” Read after the full collection rather than before it, that chiastic claim can be taken literally rather than as a figure of speech. The volume’s recurring devotional vocabulary—Communion offered without a priest in “Brother Mike,” a grandmother’s rosary and Daily Missal preserved on a desk in the dedication, a shattered Last Supper print knelt before like an altar—proposes that the poems are not simply about faith practiced elsewhere in the family’s life; they are themselves the practice, conducted in the only vocabulary—image, enjambment, the objective correlative, the withheld and then granted touch—equal to what needs saying and cannot otherwise be said. This is, finally, what Sacks’s definition of elegy as the “work of mourning” and Eliot’s definition of the objective correlative converge to describe: a poetics in which grief is not confessed but built, image by image, into a structure sturdy enough to hold it. Crossings asks to be read as that structure—a chapbook-sized reliquary for a family’s thresholds, crossed and recrossed until the crossing itself becomes a form of prayer.

Notes

Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), introduction. Read the introduction (PDF).
T.S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” in The Sacred Wood (1920), as glossed in “Objective Correlative,” The Poetry Foundation. poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/objective-correlative.
Arnold van Gennep’s three-stage model of the rite of passage (separation, margin/limen, reaggregation), as extended by Victor Turner and summarized in Kathleen Kelly, “The Origins and Content of Liminal Theory in Social Anthropology,” Crossing Thresholds (Lutterworth Press). Read the chapter (PDF).
“Imagism,” The Poetry Foundation. poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/imagism.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958), excerpted in the Double Operative course reader. Read the excerpt (PDF).
“Apostrophe,” Academy of American Poets. poets.org/glossary/apostrophe.
“Enjambment,” The Poetry Foundation. poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/enjambment.
Denise Levertov, “Some Notes on Organic Form,” Poetry (1965), as excerpted by The Poetry Foundation. poetryfoundation.org/articles/69392.
“Volta,” The Poetry Foundation. poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/volta.
“Ekphrasis,” The Poetry Foundation. poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/ekphrasis.

Works Cited

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. 1958. Excerpted at doubleoperative.com.
Eliot, T.S. “Hamlet and His Problems.” The Sacred Wood, 1920. Glossed in “Objective Correlative.” The Poetry Foundation, poetryfoundation.org.
Kelly, Kathleen. “The Origins and Content of Liminal Theory in Social Anthropology.” Crossing Thresholds, Lutterworth Press. lutterworth.com.
Levertov, Denise. “Some Notes on Organic Form.” Poetry, 1965. The Poetry Foundation, poetryfoundation.org.
Mulhern, James. Crossings: Selected Poems. Unpublished chapbook manuscript, Silver Current Press. Full text at authorjamesmulhern.com/crossings-collection.html.
Poets.org (Academy of American Poets). “Apostrophe.” poets.org/glossary/apostrophe.
The Poetry Foundation. “Ekphrasis,” “Enjambment,” “Imagism,” “Volta,” “Elegy.” Glossary of Poetic Terms, poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary.
Sacks, Peter M. The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. Introduction at sas.upenn.edu.