Michael Joseph Walsh
from A Season
*
How hard it was then
As an already speechless person
To see the lilies open
With friendliness out of the shaking earth.
As the hummingbird translated from open to open
Is falsely loved, feared and sought, is the rare thing itself
To find the fading line of its knowing
Who enters it and how
That semi-light coupling in space grows bigger
So all the while that slow fury inside you asks
In the burn of blown snow where the heart lives
What tongue describes it what chicken's
Survival does it fear and seek.
In open-book
Apocalypse lost in the light and dangerous
A low roar In which your whole body turns
Seeing nowhere else, in which the walker
Does not too curiously observe particulars,
Swinging from leaf to leaf
Into ugliness redeeming freedom.
And in that instant abstraction is killed
In the same dark as its creature or in
The most disagreeable kind of snare I never
Before allowed the grotesqueness of,
Writing promise into space and space
Into ribbons, into curtain calls stabbing the air.
*
We all have our states of fullness
Being splashed with mud and getting wet with water
And all-too-engrossing to permit of any other
Occasional faint wash of music no music
Ankle-deep in the hiss of private ghosts—
As when the half-dream comes
As if to hear us sing again
From zero to space to absolute
Encirclement
No distinctness no pointedness
In ruthless impossible life as we were meant
To climb inside
Life being born swelling nausea swelling life—
Just so there is in what we love
Also a time for wanting
So badly right then
What it was in the eye of the scream
With every inane
Word a little nearer
To discriminant sweetness
Going slowly playing dumb
Out into the dark and
Pensive embroidery
But aware of the sun and spring
Of one glance back made scarce
As a kind of wind,
Of a hand that moves
To see itself blown out across
As in the old days, in waking, and now,
Across some various difference
Into the light that the I pours in.
*
Is that what this is? The personality
Of everything perceiving, perceived.
The affective
Correlate of the welcome smell of grass
With which all the houses are filled.
Being at once “dead” and alive in empty space.
The whole truth
Of milk and raw honey, the pressed face
Of the sun when the air is filled with mist.
As when like horses
Or a low flying plane the minutes roar past
In answering reflections
And at a distance above the level of the snow you see
Like the sheen of a moving snake the glint-
Ing contours of the mountains, a still music,
An opening
Out of existence welled into future's flowered past—
Just so with the other shades preserving
The most interesting and beautiful facts
With educated eyes you go
On a path where no conscious nature comes into its own,
As a wrinkled, corpsey thinness, a diamond
Reflecting everything, a tongueless
Self-performance waking
Married in a sharp high wind.
*
But it is hard to remember
It is not so simple as that
In electric wetness your your my my
Pushing against the wall it was too soon
For the former body
Needing to breathe again much needing flesh
As sonorous as the peeling air
Which loves but will not listen
Which translates the mark of the scar
Without ever understanding what was good
In health or in sickness on the basis now
Of swarming space better muscled better dreamed—
Or else having itself begun to unzip
Into the same dark fragment as
While moving some kiss of warped light
Yielding to weird
Silence about to vomit the sun begins
To see the one thing not yet eaten, a pearl
Plucked from far in the past
Where there was clover growing
A deep shadow
A smile entrained on the border between
This day, yesterday, the dawn
Between structure and sewn story based on I
And this nothing, a sea
Inside me like in no suspended
Thirst the story is
From end to end a natural home
A life-dream crossed with blood
And extra light
To which I’d give myself
In this indirect way
Stretched out in the dark and aware of it
This necessary
Split of flower and fruit
Of summer and strange spring.
Michael Joseph Walsh is a Korean American poet. He is co-editor
for APARTMENT Poetry, and his poems have appeared or are
forthcoming in DIAGRAM, DREGINALD, Fence, jubilat, The Volta,
and elsewhere. He lives in Denver.
The phrase "the walker / Does not too curiously observe particulars"
comes from the journals of Henry David Thoreau.