Blond/e
Will A.C. Mulligan
A single image is not splendor. –Gertrude Stein
An eclipse is geographically subjective. It’s a
Room in time. As if speaking equated exactly.
Because subjectivity bends around us like light.
Gravitational lensing reveals what we seek
To obscure. Silvery stars, blinking in the bible
Blackness, bent at the elbow, each one a setting
Sun. A hole without a key covers the camera of
Our unlocked eyes. Every moment is a little bit
Later, every instrument slowly constellating into
Song. Tonight it’s noon. Oceans are archipelagos.
We’re inside the star projector as the piano plays.
I am the city, the flower, and the fruit that you are.
Presence is a telescope. This forest is a ceramic ring
Of Saturn where energies lap and break the super
-ficial blood vessels on the neck, forming a sunspot.
Like chewed perceptions, solid objects merge, mingle.
Colors are suddenly visible inside each other,
Effusive and fissile in equal parts. We meant
A translation into minute movements of the tongue.
Speech, the fifth state of matter, contains everything.
Elements collide, entering the room in time as
Suddenly as we exit. As opposed to appearance.
As opposed to enough. A sky flecked with jazz,
Backlit by expressions, silver to the touch. Yes.
Will A.C. Mulligan (he/him) is a lifelong West Coaster and Portland-based poet, Will's work responds to landscape, image, and the ethereal border between dream and reality. He also works as an environmental consultant and plays the banjo.