window / candle, and: Images, Similes, Some Alliteration

130 LAURA MULLEN WINDOW / CANDLE this light that looks like lightning outside is inside sputtering dance of tattered flame in a draft between doors knot of wick softening wall of wax it’s not that “I don’t understand why you had to be taken from us” but any act of “understanding” turns back halted at reflecting glass to my need for meaning in this life clouds in a window scud by seemingly flashing dark and bright guttering sky my brief vision of the worlds that with you go out 131 the light drowned in its own fuel a little smoke this glaucous spill of cooling wax wisps of almost opaque air blown past 132 LAURA MULLEN IMAGES, SIMILES, SOME ALLITERATION (late fall 2005 holy cross) Someone here somewhere hammering Sound loud in the emptiness Askew at the curb pieces of swollen furniture Crumbling chunks of mud-stained interior walls Haphazard belongings Silted streets buckled and blocked Sky blue sky details Constricted signal isolated sound Boat smashed down on a house Silence October a single hammer Tap tap tap like a spirit knocking Details Cloud to somehow Flushed from high weeds a small scared cat Flashes off Boat on that house aground as if The roof were a reef Steeple aslant in the churchyard Houses open to air 133 Someone on a ladder nailing something Back where it was before High green weeds already in the cracked slab Tap tap tap taptap Flapping loose edge of an azure tarp Like the wing of a bird in a trap ...