MICHAEL JOSEPH WALSH

from A Season

For weeks the same mysterious sadness.      

Not every day, but all around.

Of being taken to the hospital alive.

Of speaking so softly as to rarely be heard.

A leaking voice, an hour

As brutally compelling as                              

A house fire or   

A tsunami rolling slowly into shore.

That is how the day begins                

With an impression as bad as the sea.           

And the sounds the walls feel, sounds

More openly yourself than any        

Person scattered                    

In sudden bloom.       

But then very suddenly you sleep.     

You are in a clearing, time    

Comes flush with the dimples you've carved

In your composite path.        

And in this richest of soils unwinding suddenly        

Back into sleep you dream

A cognitive music      

Flares up at intervals,      

You dream

The way teeth dream and stones       

Of the particular forces from which you are made.

Then of the people you love

And have forgotten but will remember,

And then of the floodgates opening

In your mind's mouth:

Of wires in bruised orbit,                   

Of roses

And a room to receive them, the dream         

Bestowing its powers and shaping

Like a snake the swallowed world.

*

What word is there for that.              

What wonder clear as this.

To be woundable finally decayed      

Into the literature of all soils.

To remember next the rain, the houses          

The character of                                                         

The morning seeming closer

In a language you don’t know

While the water runs              

Red its slow passage

In the bowels of feeling with every burst                  

Feeling more and more

Some shadow, semi-snow—

And behind me                       

What I meant to express

In the arms of the promised rain,       

That things return, the same, that that

That we have always remained                                  

With eyes, and mouth and hands,

Is the thought that thought would believe—

Mouthing no and frightened yet still                         

Under shadow,

Is the shock of a perfect heartbeat bearing down.

*

But how did you do it                       

At night tied down astonished       

And let the surf exhale on your face.

A mess of stars a breath of vast rushed love.     

And all your history

Slumped weirdly between brain and heart.    

February and

Cowardice the purple watched suspension                                                                             

Of a sunset that lasts for hours.

In mythic distance.    

In a mouth of needles.

The fruit glowing blue against what           

Substance, the correlate of leaves.

In the window the electric air     

Extracting value from its first pressing.

And then I said to myself, I thought     

Having touched a great evil

Having passed over a tangle of sweetgrass, I wondered       

And ran on having in turn been made happy

Above the action still floating       

In cold weird beauty the blue autumn light—

And at what immaculate odds

Having primed the mind for a world       

In process incompletely alive

But also childlike, gentle, sweet         

Through the first real stirrings of rain      

In sprung life my absence roaring up

Into a halo a throat of gauze.

And this to let the walls be walls, at the edges             

Wounded slightly made productively sad.

And the flowers too, screaming       

Into steel-blue gradients

Is a job you have to do,      

Its bad implied permission

At the edge a still creature nesting in empty space—              

Feeling wrong, enlivened,  

Feeling itself the subject of a wire-    

Like surface—A thinged prose,         

Its mouth and eyes—

And at what immaculate odds.

Michael Joseph Walsh is a Korean-American poet. He is co-editor for APARTMENT Poetry, and his poems and reviews have appeared in DREGINALD, DIAGRAM, Fence, Likestarlings, jubilat, The Volta, and elsewhere.