This habit of being,
of being together,
of being comfortable in contact,
fitting naturally into the curves and hollows
of each other
provides a wordless nourishment,
a sense of home never achieved
by staid convention
or polite conversation
Our bones know
this is what we need:
We put our hands together
to feel the shared vibration,
we put our heads together
to hum as one.
©Wendy Mulhern
April 11, 2015
Pottery by Jennifer McCurdy; photo by Gary Mirando
My emotion spreads over the plate
like liquid too thin to hold itself together,
It drips off the edges and streams down
sticky as heated honey
See, I am not dead,
nor am I middle-aged, middle-class stodgy.
I haven’t honeycombed my feelings off
and sealed them tightly where you’ll never see them,
so I can act like I can’t even feel them,
act so dull that I convince myself
See, I ooze, I drip —
but what good does it do me?
How will I clean this all up
and get on with my day?
©Wendy Mulhern
April 7, 2015
The game that we call conversation
may move as fast as any kind of ball —
the words may volley back and forth as swiftly
but then the message hangs before it falls
Revealing layers that we may have missed
that make us double back and reconsider
that what we said may not be what we meant
and what we meant may not have been delivered
And where we stand can slide away
and leave us lodged, hapless and ungainly,
between assumption and intention
with something that we’ve said now seen
(too late) as better not to mention
In the end, compassion’s patient comb
must disentangle all the snarls of words
until in understanding we come home,
release the sting of unintended hurt.
©Wendy Mulhern
April 6, 2015
Consider “connect” —
the way it feels,
how your tongue cleaves
to the roof of your mouth,
pushes against it,
accentuating contact
in its release,
the color dark and nameless
but very smooth
like the way we felt together
after we crossed the bridge of distance —
That color was in our touching hands
and along our touching sides,
soft as fulfilled desire,
ripe as a womb.
©Wendy Mulhern
March 11, 2015
An important facet of this poem is the way it feels in your mouth to speak it. For best results, taste fully.
A friend remembers, as a child,
she once tried to give a wooden nickel
to a blind girl.
She doesn’t know why she thought
it would be fun to fool her
The blind girl was indignant,
for of course she knew,
as would we all be,
as do we all
And yet it seems so often
we try to give them to each other —
smiles without light behind them,
words without truth,
touch without
reverberation, overlap of waves,
and the profound fulfillment
of harmonic tones
We’ve been taught to pretend to be fooled
but no one ever really is:
We all sense,
at least a little,
what it is we want,
what we need to give.
©Wendy Mulhern
February 12, 2015
Hold me and swing
Let us engage
the elemental forces,
Let us harness
the power of gravity
to catapult ourselves
(slingshot around a planet
and on till morning)
Lean in to me
Let us notice
the power of support
to make us feel strong and included,
to make us feel valued and needed
It’s no great virtue
to walk alone —
It doesn’t tap the half of us,
our grand capacity
to wield the magic of connection,
to launch each other upwards into flight.
©Wendy Mulhern
October 22, 2014
I try to make sense of things,
I weary of mazes,
My mind keeps running them anyway —
What someone might have thought,
What I did and said, and still could say
I let it go
I pick it up again
Must be a cultural chasm
with no good way to understand —
There can be several explanations
all of which make someone wrong,
There must be some way
to put my mind at rest —
I try to gather us,
I try to see us all as blessed
It comes in moments
It comes in images I feel
Where I’m empowered,
Where I can fly with what is real,
Where I can swoop along the shimmers
on the rising face of waves
And I can see the way we can connect
Not in negotiations, expectations,
Not in how our lives should intersect,
Not in what we owe or what we earn
but in the sense of home
to which we all return.
©Wendy Mulhern
October 13, 2014
The fragments of several lost languages
trip over each other
presenting their partial translations
to my tongue
which tastes the sounds, comparing,
produces fractured phrases
that seem convincing
but don’t amount to much —
They are like ice floes
in a warming arctic sea
appearing formidable
but disconnected underneath
from contiguity —
I fail at fluency
when thoughts try
to follow their own lines
I return to my native tongue,
the other ones apparently
only good at talking about themselves.
©Wendy Mulhern
October 7, 2014
Your clothes don’t matter
in the place where we are all naked
Your habits, your opinions,
your credentials
weigh nothing, when we shed them all
For to bathe in this river
everything but the pure
sweet streaming of you
must be left behind
(or else it will be washed away anyway)
No one wants a piece of you
Nor can you rest on past laurels
Nor need you feel you have no name
to pull the proper recognition
Everyone who dives in
is borne along the bright current
and the river’s song
sings through us all.
©Wendy Mulhern
September 18, 2014
Things go unsaid
in little layers of awkwardness
between the places
where bridges could be stretched
across the chasm of our doubts
Things go unsaid
while we explain —
explain away the need,
in that moment
to be heard and seen
and then it’s gone
And we are left with
all the stories we will forge
of how it didn’t matter anyway
or how it’s better
that we didn’t speak
And so we drift away,
connection lost
in the superficial chatter
that we use to paper over
things that go unsaid.
©Wendy Mulhern
August 13, 2014