All last night, I slipped into falling moonlight,
slipped and fell where tentacled constellations
stirred the air. A strangely oppressive sweetness
buried my dreaming
far beneath the coelacanth’s endless shadow.
Monsters brushed beside me in trains of blindness,
throbbed their snaking covenant. Phosphorescent
grimaces tangled,
burning candles dangled on wild antennae.
Still the darkness, liquid and flowing slowly,
choked the moss and animal life about me
drowning my senses,
all but one. The song never ended. Rhythms
pulsed, atonal melodies chimed. I heard her
moaning, heard the davening spirit fishes
bidding me follow.
Now in cotton sails I am tossed and rolling,
lost to night’s indelible teasing banter.
Breathing clouds advance, and a rapid warming
marks her arrival:
Goddess white, astride the mosaic harbor,
holding heavy night in her folds of silver.
Waves arise. Viridian mirrors break like
thunder this morning.
Rick Mullin is a journalist and painter whose poetry has appeared in several print and online journals including Measure, The Raintown Review, American Arts Quarterly, Crannóg and Ep;phany. His chapbook, Aquinas Flinched, was published by Modern Metrics, an imprint of Exot Books, New York. His booklength poem, Huncke, was published in 2010 by Seven Towers, Dublin, Ireland. Rick lives in northern New Jersey.
