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Poetry from The Literary Review
Lunar Cartography
RICK MULKEY
I love the places on the moon
that remind me of your body.
Mare Nectaris, the shadow of your neck,
Mare Vaporum, deep valley of your spine.
Exiled places where touching leaves no trace.
Like the trout we caught, cold, foreign;
their scales a flat, reflected light
across the lake. Or the beggar in Krakow
who questioned us in words we couldn't
live in. Yet her hands and her flute sang like wrens
in apple trees. Their eyes, like yours, fixed
not on the stars, but on the wind, the stones,
the moon's flame in black vines.
Quantum Flux
RICK MULKEY
It's easy to believe they didn't exist, but they were
us. Even now, that day's light is carried
its 186,000 miles per second: two potential lovers
standing on a bridge above the Arkansas River, revealing
themselves in ways they can't predict: the shy one
proving how she could spit as well as any man, and the other,
the doubter, believing her capable of anything she wished. In physics
there's a place for this, a quantum moment between cause
and effect when anything can happen. In Schrodinger's box
the cat is either alive or dead; between the notes
silence exists eternal or another sound rings out.
When a marriage starts there is no certainty. We guess
at love's results. Since that moment on the bridge,
we're living and waiting in a wave.
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