On Paul Muldoon's Wings, by Wendy Fulton Steginsky
News blogs, sports blogs, entertainment blogs, and more from Philly.com, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News.
On Paul Muldoon’s Wings, by Wendy Fulton Steginsky
On Paul Muldoon’s Wings
In one continuous movement stipple
becomes ripple, John shifts to join,
hell morphs to help, posse — possibilities
that are unending as he adds or subtracts
a few letters although sleight erroneously
still sounds like slight. In his head words rise
on thermals, winged creatures that soar,
music seared in their souls. While they float
he merges notes into quirky arias from
Ireland, nocturnes, plucks arpeggios
until they grow heavy, collapse on themselves,
transform into rustling rose petals. From
those piles his nimble mind draws
juice inside dying marrow, composes
new bones for those sounds to live in.
It’s always their sounds he rearranges
like attracting molecules in peptide strings,
a bonding almost beyond his control: fright
becomes freight, pall tumbles into pale,
ever expands to never, finite to infinite.
— Wendy Fulton Steginsky
Wendy Fulton Steginsky is a poet and interfaith minister living in Doylestown, “within,” she writes, “a community of extraordinary Bucks County poets.”
