Home
Gallery Events
Workshops
Newsletter
Poetry Events
Info for Artists
About Northwind
Contact us

Regional
• Arts Calendar
• Artists
• Arts Links

2409 Jefferson Street
Port Townsend, WA
360-379-1086

Five Poems by Kay Mullen

Somewhere Men Make Plans for War

From darkened seats, the drumbeats,

the gong, the duet of zither and flute

before the stories begin and a golden dragon

dances across the water.

Not the kind with flaring nostrils,

thick flank, fiery tongue, but a playful

creature skating over the ripples,

nothing but amusement in its wooden head.

A blue-green turtle reclaims its magic sword,

carries its baby on its back.

From his yellow boat, a fisherman lands a perch

in a pail. Painted children toss bright colored balls.

Ducks with shiny down, the lacquered reds,

blues, the wooden people with marbled masks

float on the surface, myths a thousand years

have not erased from the rivers.

No one sees the waist-high water; puppeteers

behind bamboo pulling invisible strings and poles

that never tangle. This is the pleasure: the music,

the hours of practice, the telling of stories

with water and wood. We have only one life.

The Lacquer Factory

            (Vietnam, 2000)

In Hue, twelve young men sit

at long tables against a wall.

They neither look up nor smile,

intent on laborious lacquer

techniques. Their hands,

blackened with rosin,

apply as many as twelve times

to sanded and polished wood.

It is the mother-of-pearl inlay,

the gold dust and eggshell

that yields the final shine.

The work goes on where fans

spread heat and fumes.

Men paint and brush, cut

and seal when the inset

is primed. A gleam of oil

on their hands reflects the onyx

displays on the lacquer-ware

shelves. Their sweaty faces

mirror the gloss of every piece.

day 16

Today in the mail, a note, a photo.

A January day slips from the envelope:

horse trailer behind a wash line,

clothespins holding frozen

see-through garments in place.

A black tire leans against a post,

dark with its taupe hole of tumbleweed.

Behind the wire fence a pony stands

still as stone. The ashen sky.

One kind word can warm

three winter months.

You have warmed a year.

day 61

A blue heron swoops its gray wings

to a cedar branch, the stick legs

balance on a bobbing limb.

I call my son to see its yellow beak,

the rocking motion of its body.

Together we forget.

For a moment we are looking down

on the water, pausing to gather

ourselves. For a moment the wings

expand and leave us alone.

            (the previous two are grief poems after the death

            of my husband, A.J., in May 2005)

Return

I have come all the way to Corraun

not to run from sorrow but

to enter in deeper in a world of stone,

of sea and silent hillsides. I want

to surround it, see it from all sides

like Achill Island with its sand

and rugged shore, with its sheep

and barren slopes, castles broken on inlets

by storms, centuries of wind. Nothing

remains but shell. Do you see them too,

clumps of heather purpling the hills,

wild fuchsia on roadsides, vistas

of rolling green? I return to Mayo County

to walk in the steps of your fathers,

the ones who wove the threads of love

for you through years of famine and faith

long before you were born. I have come

to honor you and your name

imbedded in every cell of my bones.

It is the passage that counts,

what’s left behind, the migrations,

the breath of God in the going,

always the sounds of dancing,

of laughter and Irish songs in the wind.