from A Season
And that was spring
Having nothing in it but its own threads
Nor yet unmixed with the previous night’s dream—
Flower, voice, lightning, air.
As clouds flare up and drop
Meaning perhaps to honor it
The sun into made sleep
The intimate knots of the dream
At speech’s edge our weirdly
Live gods in parallel voice—
Just so the room though utterly dark
Smells good, rhapsodes
For hours its enmeshment with
My own concern
My own felt place,
Something mantra something war, something
Flowers in honest erasure of itself
And makes space for the new snow—
As meaning does
Without, perhaps, loving it
Gets behind a page
And blanks
Wonders flowers wonders love
Into skin the shared same
Chattiness
And skin—
Which is the power of story,
Which is the way to continually arrive
In made
Familiarity in dreams of earlier dreams
In which trust is adequate but never total
Of a gently sloping lawn and on it two mannequins
In twirling preternatural life I had thought
The smiling pattern of the body
Of fibers unwinding into
Their own quiet agendas might hold
Me churning the words
In disappointment
Around that precious and tasteless seed.
And that while I lived was normal
And crushing
The step of life at each new chapter’s end—
And at the periphery
Contorting with horror and fascination
As if touched with the juice of the lemon
To have read over and over what
One tendril then another makes real—
In truth, all life,
In the blue morning’s sheen the mouth
No simple ghost.
Having arrived itself from the future.
Having opened that gap to the wind.
Michael Joseph Walsh is a Korean-American poet living in Arlington, Virginia. He is a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Denver and co-editor for APARTMENT Poetry, and his poems and reviews have appeared in Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Fence, Likestarlings, jubilat, The Volta, and elsewhere.