Common Flowers
Michael Joseph Walsh
You can grow some things,
whether you want them or not.
The air that surrounds us here we call music,
the force of which is old, and full of life.
It imagines us here, and finds pleasure in the shape of our wound.
The door is open, and above and about
the common flowers the adventure of prolonging
other logics spreads weakly in two directions.
To this I give myself, and it heals me,
reinfects me with the shape of this place.
I sleep, I form opinions. When it rises to the surface of the mind, I greet the sun.
How otherwise should I have devised this dance of omission?
To falter before the building,
to fall over every inch of it.
And thus the music lives
the ghosts wind up the spirit;
shortcuts to pleasure, wounded springs.
But what happens tomorrow will change all that,
like a diamond left out in the cold.
And yet I would, if you wished,
tear a hole in this fabric we’ve made,
and so distend the earth,
and grow drunk on our non-continuance. The cipher burns
slowly the thing it pleases,
and this is knowing, but like the heart not knowing quite how.
The waves breathe long, and the smell of earth
in the half-shade points to a sex that would be myriad,
and shimmer, and derive from touch
what in stillness will come to pass—
here where the wind blows, and a body lives,
and where the grasses that are not dead
will tell the story of what that means.
