The Habit of Return

I. The Author’s Own Account

It is unusual for a writer to name his own method in his front matter. Mulhern does exactly that. The introduction to Crossings opens with a proposition about memory and then, without transition, states the organising principle of the book:

Memory is an act of attention. We choose what to preserve,
which words to carry forward,
which silences to honor.
In this collection of poetry, I return to thresholds—
doorways where my father asked, “Everything copacetic?”
Near a fire under a bridge, when my brother hugged my shoulder,
in a hallway where my grandfather touched my head,
by the hospital bed where a face I knew would soon be gone.¹

Three claims are packed into that passage, and the whole of the poetics follows from them. The first is that memory is selective and therefore moral: to remember is to choose, and choosing is an act for which one is answerable. The second is that the chosen units are not scenes or stories but positions — doorway, bridge, hallway, bedside. The third is the verb: I return. Not I remember, which would make the poems retrospective, but I return, which makes them present-tense and repeatable. The threshold is not where something once happened. It is where the poet goes.

The introduction closes with a chiasmus that should be read as a statement of purpose rather than as a flourish:

My family members are my prayers.
My poems are my prayers.
My family members are my poems.²

The figure works by substitution: if family equals prayer, and poem equals prayer, then family equals poem. What the syllogism licenses is a particular understanding of what these poems are for. A prayer is not a description of an absent person; it is an address to one. The poems are therefore not elegies in the ordinary sense — not reports on loss — but attempts to keep an address open. This distinction will matter when we come to the technique, because it explains why so many of these poems decline to conclude.

II. Recurrence Distinguished from Repetition

A motif that returns without gaining anything is repetition, and it is a fault. A motif that returns altered, in a new position, carrying what it acquired the last time, is recurrence, and it is a structure. The distinction is not merely terminological in Mulhern’s case, because the same image is frequently made to change function between appearances.

Consider the doorway. In “Copacetic” it is occupied by a living man: “My father stands in the doorway. / ‘Everything copacetic?’ he says.”³ In the dedication to the same volume the doorway has become the place where the father is remembered standing: “Dad—You stood in doorways asking / if everything was copacetic.”⁴ By the end of “Copacetic” the threshold has migrated into euphemism — the dying man “wants to leave— / something about a trip”³ — and in the dedication it has become metaphysical: the family consists of “those who remain / and those who have passed / into the other room.”⁴

Four appearances; four different jobs. The doorway is by turns a literal architectural feature, a habit of character, a euphemism for dying, and a cosmology. Nothing is restated. Each instance depends on the reader having met the image before, and each adds a meaning the previous one could not carry. That dependency is what makes the collection a book rather than a gathering.

III. The Threshold

The threshold is the governing motif, and it is unusually literal. Mulhern rarely reaches for the abstract liminal; he reaches for architecture. The reader is given doorways, hallways, crosswalks, windows, and the edges of rooms, and the emotional event is almost always positioned at one rather than inside one.

“Dark City” is the clearest instance, and it is worth quoting at length because the poem is built on a single spatial contrast:

My only memory of you—
in the dark hallway of your Boston house,
just off the sunny kitchen.
I was two, you were sixty.
Tall and thin, wispy silver hair,
light-blue eyes lit by a slant of kitchen sun.⁵

The grandfather is placed in the dark hallway; the light is in the kitchen behind him and reaches him only as a slant. The poem does not say that the man is between life and death, or that memory is partial, or that the child cannot follow him. It puts him in a corridor between a lit room and an unlit one and lets the architecture make the claim. When he leaves, he leaves along the corridor — “then walked down the shellacked hallway” — and the next line is his death. The hallway does the work that a paraphrase would ruin.

“The Crosswalk” relocates the same structure outdoors. The poem opens with the speaker stopped at a threshold he is not crossing, watching a father and son cross it: “Today, I saw a father and son / step onto the crosswalk. / I braked and watched them pass—.”⁶ The speaker is stationary and enclosed; the pair he envies are in motion and in the open. The poem’s subject — a son’s unmet wish to have been carried — is stated by the geometry before it is stated in words.

The window performs a quieter version of the same function. In “Shoes,” after the grandmother has explained why her toes are crooked, the poem gives her a window rather than a reflection: “She looked out the window and sighed.”⁷ The speaker then supplies what she may be seeing — her own mother carrying home a bag of cast-off shoes. The window is the hinge between two generations; it is also, characteristically, a way of not asking her.

IV. The Hand

If the threshold is the governing motif, the hand is the most reliable instrument. It recurs in three distinct offices, and the sequence in which they appear amounts to an argument.

The hand as evidence

In “The Crosswalk,” the speaker has been cataloguing his father’s failures of affection — the lifting that never happened, the misattributed memory of building a shed. Against that he sets one image: “I had other memories— / your hands over mine, / knotting my tie.”⁶ The hands are offered as counter-evidence in a case the speaker is arguing with himself. Note the preposition. Not on mine but over mine: the father’s hands enclose the son’s and guide them, which is instruction and tenderness at once, and which requires no gloss.

The hand as failed reach

“Water” ends with a gesture that cannot complete itself. After a long catalogue of a ruined body, the poem arrives at “On the dock, / hands cupped,”⁸ the cupped hand being the oldest vessel there is and, here, an empty one. The reach is toward water the man cannot get to.

The hand as instruction

The final movement of the book converts the image into an imperative. “Moving Forward” closes on the plainest statement of ethics in the collection: to “touch a hand to show we care, / massage a pained foot, / or simply listen to someone’s despair.”⁹ The hand that was evidence in one poem and futility in another becomes, at the end, a thing the reader is asked to use.

The arc is exact and, so far as one can tell, deliberate: the hand is first something done to the speaker, then something the speaker cannot do, then something anyone may do. A motif has been carried from passivity through helplessness to agency without a single line of commentary marking the transit.

V. Water

Water is the motif most often noticed in this work and the one most at risk of being over-read, since it is also the most conventional. What distinguishes Mulhern’s use of it is that he almost never lets it be symbolic on its own terms; he makes it do descriptive labour first, and permits the resonance to arrive as a by-product.

The opening of “Water” is a catalogue of a body rendered as terrain:

The old man—
flaccid face,
blue-water eyes,
rough-sloped nose,
broken capillaries
like tributaries on arid land.
His belly—
a white boulder
strewn with seaweed hair.⁸

The governing conceit is drought. Eyes hold water; capillaries are “tributaries” on land that is “arid”; the belly is a “boulder” with “seaweed” on it, which is to say a rock left behind by a tide that has gone out. The body is a landscape from which the water has withdrawn. Only after this is established does the poem reach the dock and the empty cupped hands. The symbolic charge of the ending is entirely produced by the accuracy of the description that precedes it; nothing has to be asserted.

Elsewhere water is domestic and unremarked. A woman “put dishes in the sink and ran water”;¹⁰ a man caring for a dying dog “made sure she had water.”⁹ These are not symbols so much as chores, and their unremarkableness is the point: in this body of work the sacramental and the menial use the same tap. That equivalence is a settled conviction rather than an effect, and it is treated at greater length in the companion essay Water, and What It Carries.

VI. Light, and the Slant of Kitchen Sun

Light and darkness form the most conventional pairing in the work, and Mulhern’s handling of it is uneven — a candid assessment must say so. Where it succeeds, it succeeds because the light is given a source and an angle rather than a meaning.

“A slant of kitchen sun” is the exemplary instance.⁵ The phrase is doing three things at once: it locates the light (kitchen), it gives it a geometry (slant), and it declines to interpret it. That the grandfather’s pale eyes are “lit” by it is simply what happens when a man stands at the edge of a lit room. Any reader who wishes to hear Dickinson’s “certain Slant of light” behind the line is free to, and the poem neither invites nor forbids it.

Compare the shadow in “Copacetic”: “I sat by him until shadows crossed his face.”³ The verb is crossed — the book’s title-word, arriving as a description of late-afternoon light in a hospital room. The pun is available but unpressed. This is the collection’s characteristic tact: the resonance is placed within reach and then left alone.

Where the pairing is less successful, it is because light has been asked to signify without being seen — to stand for hope or transcendence as a general proposition. The difference between the strong and the weak instances is consistently the presence or absence of a physical source.

VII. The Domestic Object as Reliquary

Mulhern’s fourth recurring system is the household object charged with more feeling than it can comfortably hold. A yellow teapot, a pair of Dr. Scholl’s, a spoonful of red Jell-O, a cheap framed print.

“The Teapot” begins as a search: “‘Do you have the yellow teapot?’ my mother asked. / ‘Beth told me I promised it to you long ago.’”¹¹ The object is missing, and the search for it releases the Christmas table — the pies, the mahogany, Streisand, “Nanna’s Irish prayer— / ‘thy gifts’—received.”¹¹ The teapot is a reliquary in the strict sense: an ordinary container whose value is entirely a function of what it has been near.

“Shoes” performs the same operation on footwear, and adds a generational turn. The grandmother explains her crooked toes: “‘My mother cleaned houses for the rich,’ she said. / ‘We had to wear the shoes she brought home. / They were often small.’”⁷ A deformity is revealed as a class inheritance, delivered without complaint and closed with a laugh. The poem’s tact is that it never says poverty; it says the toes, I mean.

The most compressed instance is in “Last Supper,” where the news of a death and a domestic emergency arrive in the same breath: “‘My father’s dead. / Can you shine my shoes?’”¹² Two sentences, no connective, no comment. Grief and errand are set side by side because that is how they arrive. A few lines later the print of The Last Supper is found face-down with “its frame splintered”¹² — a devotional image broken by an accident nobody intended, which is as close as the poem comes to saying anything about faith.

VIII. The Unasked Question and the Withheld Gloss

A fifth motif is verbal rather than visual: the question that stands in for an unaskable one. “Everything copacetic?” is the book’s recurring formula, and the introduction identifies its subjects as “men who couldn’t cry, women who worked until their feet hurt, / children who waited for words that never came.”¹

The dedication then performs a remarkable act of interpretation on the father’s formula: “It wasn’t always, but your asking / made it so.”⁴ The inadequate question is not excused; it is reclassified. The asking, not the answer, was the love. This is the central ethical manoeuvre of the whole body of work — the reading of insufficient speech as sufficient feeling — and it is what keeps the family poems from becoming grievances.

Formally, the corollary is the withheld gloss. “Copacetic” is the pattern case:

“Don’t want it.”
“You’ve got to eat, Dad.”
“I’m not hungry.” He pushed it away.³

Three lines of speech, one clause of action, no interpretation. The refusal of food by a dying man is among the most heavily freighted moments available to a writer, and the poem spends four words on it. What follows is equally spare: “Mostly, he slept. / Sometimes he asked the time. / I left at nine.” The flat report of the hour is the poem’s most affecting line precisely because it declines to be affecting.

IX. The Motifs in the Fiction

The system is not confined to the poems. The Aiden Glencar story “Arise and Go Now” opens by putting its narrator at a door and moving him, immediately, through a house toward light:

I arrived at Rita’s house about noon. Her blue eyes widened when she opened the door. … We walked through the hallway and kitchen to a brick patio covered by a pergola. … Sunlight glimmered through the red cedar lattice above us, dappling her face.¹³

Door, hallway, kitchen, dappled light on a face: the identical sequence as “Dark City,” in prose, at a different tempo, with the valence reversed — here the passage leads outward into sun rather than inward into a dark corridor. The recurrence across genres is the strongest available evidence that these images constitute a compositional system rather than the local furniture of a single book.

The fiction also supplies the juxtaposition the poems favour. Rita, having opened the door in a nightdress patterned with honey-bees, holds a paperback whose cover shows “[a] girl in a red dress… in front of a grave” with “[t]he ground… on fire,” and dismisses it in a word: “Junk.”¹³ A lurid image of the afterlife is introduced and waved away inside two sentences, in a scene otherwise made of sunlight and grass. The author’s own note on his prose describes this habit precisely: “a willingness to slow down” and “a habit of placing the ordinary and the unspeakable in the same paragraph.”¹⁴

X. The Skill: How the Motifs Are Made to Work

Motifs do not function because they are repeated. They function because of what the sentences around them are doing. Four techniques recur.

1. Syntactic suspension

“Water” withholds a finite verb through its entire opening: “The old man— / flaccid face, / blue-water eyes, / rough-sloped nose…” is a noun and a series of appositives with nothing to predicate them. The reader is held in grammatical incompletion for the length of the description, which is a formal analogue of a life suspended. The poem’s structure and its subject are the same thing.

2. The dash as removed connective

Mulhern’s dash almost always marks an omission he does not intend to supply: “My only memory of you—”; “The old man—”; “I braked and watched them pass—”; “I had other memories—.” In each case the dash stands where an explanatory clause would go. The punctuation is load-bearing: it is the visible sign of the withheld gloss.

3. Understatement as measurement

After discovering that his father has credited a shared memory to another son, the speaker of “The Crosswalk” reports: “I was bothered just a bit.”⁶ The line is not modest; it is calibrated. The gap between the size of the wound and the size of the phrase is where the feeling is kept, and a reader who has been paying attention supplies the difference.

4. The catalogue, levelled

Where the poems widen their scope they do so by list, and the lists deliberately refuse hierarchy. “To Be” places “the Wife of Bath’s scarlet stockings” and “poor Yorick’s skull” in the same syntactic rank as “a flattened sneaker on some highway” and “a lost sock under a sagging couch.”¹⁵ Monument and litter are given identical grammatical weight. The device is the formal expression of the collection’s central conviction — that nothing is too small to be kept — and it is the same conviction that produces the teapot and the shoes.

XI. Purpose: Prayer, Mercy, and the Unfinished

Why return at all? The introduction has already answered: the poems are prayers, and a prayer is an address rather than a report. But there is a second answer available in the shape of the work.

Almost none of these poems resolve. “Copacetic” ends with a nurse’s phone call and a man who “wants to leave— / something about a trip”; the trip of the opening stanza has returned, transformed, and the poem stops there. “The Crosswalk” does not forgive the father and does not indict him. “Moving Forward” euthanises the dog and moves directly to a stranger’s formula — “Sorry for your loss” — and a man leaning on a steering wheel. The refusal of closure is consistent enough to be structural.

This is where recurrence and purpose meet. If a poem concluded, the image inside it would be finished with, and the address would close. By leaving the poems open and letting the images travel between them, the writer keeps the material in circulation. The doorway is available to the next poem because no poem has used it up. What looks like a habit of return is, functionally, a refusal to let anything be over.

The ethical name for this in Mulhern’s work is mercy. The father who could only ask “Everything copacetic?” is not corrected; he is re-read. The grandmother’s crooked toes are not made into an indictment of the households her mother cleaned. The dog is not spared the diapers or the needle, and the mother who suggests otherwise is answered but not condemned. Judgment would require conclusions, and conclusions are precisely what these poems decline to reach.

XII. Conclusion: What Recurrence Argues

Taken together, the motifs make a claim that no single poem states. The threshold says that the important moments happen at edges, between one condition and another. The hand says that what passes between people passes through touch rather than speech. Water says that the body is a landscape and that landscapes dry. The household object says that value is conferred by proximity to love. The unasked question says that insufficient words may still be sufficient feeling.

Each of these is arguable on its own. Together, and repeated across two genres and several decades, they amount to something harder to argue with: a sustained proposal that ordinary life is the whole of the material, and that attention is the only instrument required. The poems do not ask the reader to believe anything in particular. They ask the reader to look at a doorway, a pair of shoes, a spoon of red Jell-O, and to notice that nothing there has actually been lost — that the father is still standing in the doorway asking, every time the poem is read.

That is what the recurrence is for. It is not a stylistic signature and not a limitation of range. It is a method for keeping things, and it works.

— Silver Current Press

Notes

Works Quoted

Read the Complete Collection Thin Places Analysis & Evaluation All Essays