Let’s all raise a glass to poet Rick Mulkey, whose ode exquisitely captures “the liquid mystery train / of peril and possibility.” “Concerning Whiskey” was first published in MacQueen’s Quinterly: Knock-your-socks-off Art and Literature (January 2020.)
Concerning Whiskey
Potent, peaty, brine-filled dram
like the salt-washed rocks of sheltered bays;
like the turf fires beneath thatched roofs; like rain
falling hard and soot blackening the stone hearth;
like the venerable who curl into themselves
and wait for spring, old women, grown diaphanous,
who flutter like moths embalmed in their silver-haired cocoons,
aged, at last, into their ghostlier selves; like their men
no longer storming pastures as fierce scouring winds,
but, lost in their suffering, now gnaw remorse
and grasp at guilt as they once did pipe and pint.
This is the alchemy of fire and air, the chemistry of creek and valley.
The distillate of place and time. Distillate of memory.
Soft, sugary, amber-clouded elixir like the lure
of meadowsweet and chicory, like October smoke
hanging over maple and oak; like the sophistry of sex
on sunlit mornings in late December,
cold hands along the flushed length of spine and breast,
breath passing across the altar of tongue, frosting bedroom windows;
like the dulcet notes of mandolin, the sorrowful soaring of fiddle;
the primal groan of Cash’s Ring of Fire,
or Elvis’s moaning call to Love Me Tender.
This is the push and pull, the liquid mystery train
of peril and possibility we can’t explain
though it carries a little of everything: the bog, the raisin,
the raison d’etre, the pie safe and gun safe, the morning promises
and midnight faults, the scars forgotten and reclaimed,
the ice, in expectation, clanging in a glass.
Thanks, everyone. — Denise Duhamel