Michael Joseph Walsh

Meridian

This feeling at least is certain.

I walk slowly alongside it.

One part is sickness,

one is intimacy

that walks in the sun,

a thin and vast

undulation

to which people speak,

or the closed eyes

of the lake that turn

me out of myself

and set no limit to love.

Just as the scenery,

when it is truly seen,

reacts on the life of the seer,

so the beloved's

gait becomes clear to you

and shatters the smooth body of the crowd.

What I’m saying is,

our hells are not the same.

In autumn

when one has the strength,

in spring when one crawls

out of the sun

and into the lake, the truth

is one jerky step, is a mode

of sleep less light more flesh,

where the usual things

have density

and over the churning

oil you feel the eyes of all you wanted

fixed on you.

In the end what stands out is the green mountain,

the cloud drifting across it.

Let everyone live, let no one

disappear.

Let the blood walk

its slow loop around its meridian,

and the flowers keep time for us,

opening and closing their mouths.

The measured earth is neither whole,

nor shadow of a whole.

All mountains are polyglots.

And though the sun is hot,

and though I tremble,

let those gates slide open for me.

Forecast

If each of us is arriving

now under the sign of feeling,

which here in sweet

eerie thoughtlessness is

constellated as the knowledge of evil,

then we can say that what arises

in the shadow of that

cross-eyed star is what

saying nothing means

in the context of this recording:

this territory

that would be our friend

and in the fruit

of our split would call out from that whorl

which in summer I remember & in winter I

put deep back in the ground.

This is what it means to live

without figure, between oneself, having passed

from speech to warm

presence without first

(& this is the miracle)

having with dim dis-

connectedness poured the juice of that meat

out into the paid-for air.

The light that spills

through the window is warm,

& crushes this image,

& with a careful human

glance embeds its name in the dark,

then swallows us whole.

What follows from this

expands as a feeling arises:

that you will you meet me on that ground, or find me

before one order

of feeling folds into its brethren,

fact of that ugly future, sunlight

over the bed with stillness & broken glass.

& so what I seek

I experience constantly.

& love is here, & toward me

the danger that wakes the day's swallowed back, candle

that turns its light from mirror

to bitten mouth.

It is already a world,

this hybrid machine.

It is the prettiest

ambrosial flower, fluid-soaked

& normal.

& one connects with this

the raw night

one has a fondness for,

the animal that in its walking conceals

what gentleness, luxuriant cruelty,

which is the story of every accessible form.

The day is long,

it fills up with paper.

The program to which I submit myself

grows murky.

It forecasts this very dream.