The Reader as Confessor

I. A Different Kind of Listening

The essays already devoted to Mulhern’s confessor figures — grandmothers, priests-by-implication, children entrusted with secrets — have examined confession as a structure between characters, staged within scenes. This essay looks at a related but formally distinct phenomenon that occurs almost exclusively in the poetry of Crossings: a narrator who turns away from third-person recollection and addresses a “you” directly, mid-poem, as though the dead or absent addressee were suddenly, briefly, present to receive what is being said. Where the fiction’s confessions pass between characters who share a scene, these poems collapse the distance between speaker and addressee entirely, making the reader an accidental witness to an act of direct address that was never meant for a general audience. The effect is to turn the reader into something like a confessor by proxy — present for words that are grammatically aimed at someone else, someone who, in nearly every case, cannot answer back.

II. “We’d Scrape the Rocks”: Address to the Living Who Will Not Live Long

The collection’s grandmother poem stages its second-person address at the level of the whole poem’s grammar, not merely in scattered lines. From its opening movement, the poem speaks past its ostensible occasion (a visit, a bath) directly to the grandmother herself: “When Mom and I arrived, / you hid a donut behind the frame. / I stared at an old photograph, / gray-yellow as your skin.”¹ The poem never once refers to her in the third person; every observation is delivered as something said to her face, even the ones she could not have overheard, such as the closing image of the bathwater itself: “Behind the door, / bathwater swayed, / Clew Bay in an old white tub, / Brigid’s rock gleamed / in sour-salted steam.”¹ The address does not falter even when the speaker is physically excluded from the room — sent to “Grandpa’s chair” to recite prayers while his mother bathes Nana behind a closed door — which means the poem’s “you” persists past the point where any literal listening is possible. This is the device’s central paradox: the more intimate the address becomes, the less capable the addressee is of receiving it, so that by the poem’s final image the “you” has become almost entirely rhetorical, sustained by the poem’s grammar rather than by any scene of actual communication.

III. “The Crosswalk” and “Piano”: Address to the Dead

Two of the collection’s most emotionally exposed poems direct their “you” at addressees who are already dead by the time of speaking, converting second-person address into something close to prayer. “The Crosswalk” recalls a father’s hands on the speaker’s shoulders at a family party, misremembered by another relative as belonging to a different son — “I heard you say, / ’Remember when Danny and I built the shed?’ / But it wasn’t my brother who cut wood / and hammered nails with you”² — before the poem’s final stanza reveals the addressee is being spoken to across the threshold of the casket itself: “It was on the table by your casket. / Your hands on my shoulders. / One moment, framed.”² The poem’s grammar refuses to shift into elegiac third person even at the moment of the father’s death; the “you” that was corrected mid-poem over a misremembered anecdote is the same “you” addressed at the coffin, collapsing living conversation and posthumous address into a single unbroken grammatical relationship. “Piano” performs an even starker version of the same move, addressing an act of domestic violence directly to its perpetrator: “That gray day, you took an axe to the Steinway… You shattered the shiny veneer… I thought of my mother, / the day she moved out, / how you changed the locks.”² Here the second person does something confession’s usual structure cannot: it accuses without requiring the accused to be present to hear it, staging a confrontation that could never have occurred safely in life, made possible only by poetry’s willingness to speak to someone who is not, and perhaps never was, listening.

IV. “Brother Mark”: Address as Refusal to Let Go

The collection’s elegy for a brother figure uses second-person address to enact, formally, the psychological refusal at the poem’s center — an unwillingness to accept that the addressed “you” is gone. “Your arm on my shoulder, / your face orange from flames… I loved the circle of flickering flames and logs. / Sometimes in the blackness of my room, / a fire blazes. / I see our faces. / Hear our voices.”³ The poem’s closing lines make the temporal confusion explicit rather than incidental: “I wish we’d stayed, / never stepped into the snowy light. / Our time together— / perpetually that night.”³ The word “perpetually” is doing exactly the same structural work here that second-person address does throughout the collection: it converts a single, finite, past occasion into something ongoing, present-tense, still addressable. To say “you” to someone who is gone is already to perform, grammatically, the wish the poem states outright — that the moment never end, that the addressee remain reachable by speech regardless of what has actually happened to them.

V. The Reader’s Involuntary Position

None of these poems announce that they are being overheard, and that is precisely the source of their force. A reader encountering “you hid a donut behind the frame” or “you took an axe to the Steinway” has no grammatical position available except that of an unaddressed third party who happens to be present for a communication meant for someone else — structurally identical to Billy in “A Bath,” listening through a closed door to sounds he is not meant to interpret, or to Jimmy in “Assumptions,” entrusted with a confession that exceeds a child’s proper role. The poems do not invite the reader in the way a third-person elegy invites a reader to sympathize from outside; they position the reader as an accidental confessor, present for testimony that the “I” of the poem needed to say aloud regardless of whether the “you” could hear it, and regardless of whether anyone else was meant to hear it either. This is the sense in which the essay’s title should be taken literally rather than metaphorically: the reader of these poems is not asked to judge or absolve, only to have been present, which is exactly the function Mulhern’s fiction elsewhere assigns to its designated child-confessors.

VI. Conclusion: Grammar as the Last Confessional

Second-person address in Crossings accomplishes formally what the fiction’s confession scenes accomplish through plot: it creates an occasion for saying the otherwise unsayable by constructing, however fictively, a listener. The difference is that the poems’ listeners are almost always unavailable — dying, dead, or physically sealed behind a door — which means the “you” of these poems survives its addressee’s absence purely as a grammatical commitment, a refusal on the speaker’s part to downgrade the address to memory’s usual third person. Read alongside the corpus’s confessor figures, this reveals a consistent underlying conviction: that being heard, in Mulhern’s imagination, does not strictly require a listener capable of hearing. It requires only the grammatical act of address, sustained past the point of reasonable hope, which the reader — present by accident, absolved of nothing, asked only to have listened — receives in the listener’s place.

— Silver Current Press

Notes

Works Quoted

All Essays Mapped in Water and Bone