Michael Joseph Walsh
After Reverdy
The mountain talks
To the ceiling
A standing force
Is the other
The edge
Stretching
The feet remotely the world’s charged mirror
Unborn seeing midnight
In a sky of ordinary ice
Or else the same paint
As once was light
The other side
of the eye is
Risk
So the distance
Between trains
Fronts the mirror
In English on every corner
Ready to die
I touch your head
I can even have
As expected
Fingers and feet together
Pity
Crying distance
A heartbeat at Roman angles
Upside the head as the sun itself
And in all of that was light, the past
The wick collapses
The sun shines
With geotechnical force
Looks at the sewing machine
And dies
And in all of that
On this side instead of the frozen abyss
Against the opposite wall the heartbeat
Shakes the light
“Sunburst spare me”
Menacing late and now
Faces cover the page
In my opinion
Under the eaves there is a light
Thou sugarest
The threat of silence
To burn all the paper
Clear sky water
In the shower a simple cool
Notion of time that limits
Beyond the walls
The triangle
Of language a superstar
Mountain in nuclear gown
In the mirror a simple couplet
At different times in the screaming room
As in the meantime
At spinal midnight
Time is small
Shaking the expected head
The fingertips tap
As we would have it
Out of the freezer
Into the fever and undistracted
Held together and always
Even here, the altar
Touching thunder
Beyond creation and no more hope
Precisely the concept
Of time the world would sleep to
And so we stopped
You have to see it
Day and night I see it
The ceiling
Accommodates the rumor
All the bytes
In the landscape drop the world
To sleep
As your shadow’s cool stands face
To freezing face with someone
Like you
To echo the eye
In the mirror as in the past
The head touched
The head
Killed the heartbeat
Distracted eye
The triangle
Next to the black abyss
Wrapped around
What sunlight
Or feet caressing
A network of heads
The walls extend
By a hair at the clock’s edge
Empty rooms
Proliferate
The feet touching
Anything that moves
As an empty train
On the other side of the mirror
Grasps the whole face
Remotely
A Boat of Light
She gave me water she gave me a cup
Of wormy dirt she gave me the movement
Of thunder without guile
The corpse the fable the innocent
Dark earth crossed & re-crossed
& my own words
Returned to me then like my face reflected
Cleanly in a pool of still blood.
I had my answer
Yet I was by some secret
Order inspired to continue
To think
To read the moral contours of the dreams
I had been given & for which I had
Not asked.
She gave me words she gave
Me unsustainable receptive
Loss if only
Of chaos flayed open delicate
Nervalian flower the grasses
Repeating back
To me each of my
Ill-chosen wishes.
What I observe you shall
Observe
From afar or from infinite-
ly deep inside
My ocular orbit you shall
Observe the world which is not
Yet destroyed & then
With excruciating precision its first
& most delicate fatal cracks.
She gave me brambles she gave me
Stones the color of milk
& all the wildness of paradox its un-
dulant light like a school of writhing minnows
Or like the echo
Of sunlight
On the eyelids
In the instant of one’s death,
Or the melody
Which is molecular
& haunts
Of our daylight
In the cooling air’s
Dictation,
More than wind.
She gave me music she gave me
Petals to adorn my beard stiff
With human oils,
I who had for centuries sat
At the center of a meadow in the arms
Of its soft & unforgiving breeze.
For is not the soul
In its thickness
Of misdeeds
Like a foam of moon-
lit saliva, an immensity
Of effulgent crystal,
A boat of light?
She gave me seriousness she gave me
A phalanx of stone
Cathedrals, she gave me a lesson in
Familiar particles the bleary
Arms made gigantic by
The name she gives herself,
Oh happy un-
happy, to let the void
Incline toward our
Preservation
As far as we
& the fates would be
Moon-like, voluminous
Sundry & concealed
In her hair