The Tricycle
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Tricycle
Web and Dewdrops
Left Tree Trunk / Ant's Spider

A predatory chill. Dry brittle branches stirring,
Tapping, tapping window glass.
Sonorous, rhythmic toll, sweeps sudden chimes
Through eerie still of early morning night.
Submitting to maternal sound, a distant howling,
Keening, summons silence. The pendulum stops.
Wraith cloaked clouds, attendant sentinels of souls,
Like parishioners bearing empty urns, descend
To rend transgressing darkness, conjuring might
To clarion call, entrancing shattered shards of night
Within impeding visions, as they glean nigredo skies.
Where now Eternal is swallowed and dies in the pupil of an eye,
Only to regurgitate its essence, burnishing dark distilling thoughts
Which drip like early morning dew from gilded web of amber,
Casting beaded spells, like pearls across the valley floor.
Prismatic visions wakened, beneath albedo skies.
In soft ethereal presence of an old wooden house.
Weaving through sweet nocturne of a sleeping child
The elegiac wail of a passing train preludes a liminary dream
Within fermenting resonance of a ticking clock.
In concept, is there a collation of meaning blending elements of the tricycle painting and the artists’ early experience
as a child of five, related in his poem, Man in the Window, below? Both works contain meaningfully evolved, perhaps archetypically intuited, aspects of observation, all of which combine and ultimately culminate in the central theme of
the finished painting, The Tricycle.
At the time related below, Mulleian, then at age five, was in the care of his grandparents, Marcos and Genevieve Mulleian, all of whom shared one of the six-unit apartments in an old three story Victorian building in San Francisco.
Early one autumn afternoon, the young boy is left in his backyard to play on his tricycle, and experiences an event that will come to be indelibly etched in his memory. While day-dreaming on his tricycle, Mulleian notices, this first of many times, a stony-faced, elderly Irishman, another tenant of the building known to be alcoholic, wrapped in a bathrobe, staring from his first floor kitchen window, motionless, as always, with the same fixed stare, intently watching the young artist at play.
Man in the Window:
Sentient wonders, stir paper and sand with soft tempered breeze, sparring energetic thoughts, as I sit resting my chin on the handlebar, feeling stealthy shadows move from late noon light, beguiling gnomon of the towering weathered fence, reaches quietly, as I play in my back yard on my tricycle.
Unbidden, comes ethereal presence, inflected in the distant scream of a cat. Visceral, appears this haunting vision, as I look up, my eyes ensnared by fractal facet, sharp jewel-like glistening, from glasses, while black birds fly ghost-like from milky white hair, and a cross around his neck, like a gorget.
Enrobed, he peers, between his curtained brackets, motionless within the heavy lace, behind a vibrant sheet of sunlight, metallic, where clouds sail freely through a red spider webbed face, trapped on window glass, he watches me play on my tricycle.