Water in James Mulhern’s work is almost never grand. It does not part or flood or drown anyone in a single dramatic stroke. It arrives instead as a tide pool by a “bony cliff,” as tears mistaken for dew on a fall afternoon, as rain tapping a windowpane while someone falls asleep, as the indignities of a body that can no longer hold its own water. It is, in other words, the element least interested in spectacle and most interested in care — which is exactly why it carries so much of the weight in his fiction and verse.
The clearest instance of water asked to do theological work is the beach trip at the center of “Assumptions.” The family drives to Nantasket for one reason: “the cure Helen dragged everyone to Nantasket for.” Two women walk into the sea to be healed, in the plain, unexamined faith of people who have always gone to the shore when something in the body needs fixing. The story lets the reader believe, briefly, that the water is where the miracle will happen — that this is a baptism in the ordinary sense, immersion as cure. Then it quietly withdraws that promise. “The cure… does not come from the water. It comes from the Son, after death.” The sea does not fail the family so much as it clarifies what water is actually for in this world: not the site of the miracle, but the place you go while waiting for one, the ritual that dignifies the waiting.
Mulhern’s poems keep the water at a more intimate, unglamorous scale. In “Leaves,” the wet ground of a childhood chore — “smell of earth and wet decay,” a flashlight hunting the last stray leaf — returns, stanza by stanza, as the wet ground of a grave. The poem never announces the shift. It simply repeats the same physical sensations, the cold air, the visible breath, until “the damp leaves shimmer like tears” and the reader realizes the raking was always training for this later kneeling. Water here is memory’s medium: the thing that returns, involuntarily, disguised as weather.
In “Honeymoon,” water turns domestic and tender at once. A speaker rubs ointment into a mother’s calloused heel while “the rain outside taps a pane” and an old photograph glows on the end table. “I think of how far these feet have walked, / the tenderness at the bottom of her sole.” The rain does no plot work at all — it simply keeps time, marking the room as a place where care is being paid out in small, unglamorous installments. And in “Moving Forward,” Mulhern goes further, refusing to look away from water at its least dignified: a dying dog’s “bloody urine,” the diapers that keep “falling off,” an aging mother’s failing eyes and a body “filled with metal.” The poem’s hard-won conclusion — “All of the living are broken, inside and out… it’s how we care for others… that helps us become whole again” — is earned precisely because the water in it is the humiliating, physical kind that most writing edits out. This is the same governing method that runs through the fiction: grace administered by unreliable, embarrassed, exhausted people, through the most undignified materials available, and working anyway.
Taken together, the tide pool, the rained-on windowpane, and the incontinent old dog form a single argument about what water actually is in this body of work. It is not the medium of the miracle. It is the medium of tending — the substance you keep encountering exactly where illness, mourning, and love happen to intersect. Mulhern trusts water to carry meaning precisely because he refuses to dramatize it. A tear that might be dew, a tide that might be a cure, a rain that is only rain until you notice what it is falling on: that reticence is the whole technique, and it is why the water in these pages, unlike the fire, never announces itself. It only asks to be noticed on the way past.