Three Poems by Steve Mulligan

Movement in Grey

  

A tear attached to a faucet, 

drawling downward 

stretching slightly 

from the chrome and 

bending its bubble  

until it breaks  

not bursts but 

slips and starts its spring 

shaped fall that, 

resounds softly audibly, 

after an instant’s anticipation, 

“drip”

 

 

 

I Wish I Never Called the Arborist

 

Twin maples frame my front walk. 

Both are aging, gracefully  

and still towering,  

but stiffer than they ought to be,  

their bark too brittle to support another century.   

Still, their canopies are wide. Their plumage full. They stretch out like a morning yawn.  

They are mature trees. Stately, but not over-the-hill. The kind people covet for their suburbs. 

So I was surprised when the city said they must be cut down. I only called for a trim. A couple dead branches threatened the cars along the street below. Cut the branches, not the trees! 

The arborist advised otherwise. “See this?” The horned end of his hammer hacked at a maple’s base. Its roots were soft, rotten. They scooped out like peanut butter from a jar.  

This proved his point: the maples must be condemned. 

My daughter cried, “Fairies live in those trees!” And so we protested their destruction, successfully. 

But while the maples remain, I have changed.  Driving through the neighbourhood, I study the other trees with sadness. They are so large and so lovely. Are they titans or are they doomed?

 

 

 

Please, God

 

I prayed in hot gymnasiums. In the humid breath of boys’ basketball games—thick like a greenhouse, and sealed from the Michigan winter, the huffing and panting and exhaling collected upon itself.  

My older brother played guard or small forward. I played with toys on the bleachers while my mom watched. The teams had mostly pale, white, Catholic school kids. Kids like me.  

When the score was close, I had a ritual: clasp hand in prayer, draw chin to neck, and clamp eyes closed until it hurt. The pain in the last part was to prove how bad I wanted this. “Please, God, let Dan’s team win.” 

He did sometimes, win. But I find myself stingier with prayers nowadays. Do I owe God for every one that is answered? I worry there is some sort of ledger for this. So I pause before I pray now. And I wonder, is it worth going heavenward? Or should I save it for something serious? A lump under the skin, a swerving semi, despair.  

I know these are the wrong questions—you can’t optimize divine intervention. St. Paul said to pray always, incessantly. Like a needy child at bedtime, no number of asks is too many. As if every “please, God” pleases God.

by Steve Mulligan