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Wherever There Is Water There Is Wild
In the middle of a city or along a suburban
street, wherever there is water
there is wild—water wild as a wilderness
lake, water wild as water always
is, despite whatever human habitations might
by happenstance encroach upon the shore.
Here, where city buses whoosh and trucks diesel
by, the breeze plays upon the sunlit
lake, wavelets rippling the deep
blue, marsh reeds swaying like stage-lit dancers.
It is what these tundra swans, loons, and herons
know—that wherever there is water
there is wild, and the water’s wildness is within
them, too—within them and within us.
It is what the whispering water knows in its wild
watery way—all things that breathe, walk, pulse,
all things are mostly water. Whatever sees water
is water, whatever drinks water is water drinking.
Feel the wildness of the water within this amphora
of flesh, this wineskin of ourselves that siphons
water into a flicker of consciousness where, watery-
eyed, we look out on a windswept world.
Our tongues eternally taste the watery wild
of ourselves; bathing, we feel the slight membrane
of skin separating ourselves, water from water,
which is why water is restful, why our watery
eyes are drawn to water, are hypnotized by
water’s movement and moods. It is the wildness
that we are and will be when one day
we flow back. See the waterlights glinting
on these wavelets—a hundred thousand ancestors’
eyes long since returned to the source. Wick the water
that is you to light your candle-eyes. Wherever
there is water there is wild.
Timothy Walsh (website) has placed poems and short stories in The North American Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Inkwell, New Millennium Writings and others. His awards include the Grand Prize in the Atlanta Review International Poetry Competition, the Kurt Vonnegut Fiction Prize from North American Review, and the Wisconsin Academy Fiction Prize. He has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac and has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize. He is the author of a book of literary criticism, The Dark Matter of Words: Absence, Unknowing, and Emptiness in Literature (Southern Illinois University Press) and two poetry collections, Wild Apples (Parallel Press) and Blue Lace Colander (Marsh River Editions). He is an Assistant Dean at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Phantom Limbs at the Antique Mall
She rummages through jam-packed stalls,
scours cluttered walls,
hallways packed high with the leavings
of reef-wrecked lives,
wives and husbands wandering, two by two,
she happily husbandless on this cold October day.
There is a stall of guns and one of clocks,
a room packed with commemorative spoons
arranged in racks,
on the walls, faded flour sacks ragged with wear.
A shelf of ruby glass catches her eye,
a mirror-backed sideboard big as a house.
She runs a finger along a marble-topped commode,
peers into oversize armoires sheltering desolate ghosts.
She tries a camelback loveseat,
stretches out on a fainting couch,
discovers the resident cat, her fur musty
with the decades’ dust, a century of shadows,
a soft and whiskered thing sentenced to a life
haunting hutches, stalking midnight mice.
Then, the little statue on a pedestal
stood in an island of light—
a sister shorn of wings, shorn of arms,
the twist of her torso her yearnings’ gist.
Venus di Milo, the nameplate said,
the keyed edge of the letters sliding perfectly
in the keyhole sockets of her eyes,
unlocking the tumblers of her jumbled quest.
She cradled her lost sister on her sweatered arm,
bought her at the silver bell counter,
carried her like a ransomed daughter,
and walked the long lake way home.
Last Wednesday, the radio spoke of phantom limbs—
amputees who still feel missing arms and legs,
who have an itch with nowhere to scratch.
Do you scratch an itch or itch a scratch?
Which is the itch and which is the scratch?
Fingers match the shape of the itch,
flesh and air, emptiness everywhere,
the air infiltrating ourselves,
our lungs buoying us up like lifejackets.
The May chorus of frogs,
the dense November fogs off Newfoundland,
the holiness of the heronry as twilight drops,
muskrats veeing across the night-calm sound—
all this began to come dimly, dimly back.
Above her as she walked, trees loosed their leaves
to skitter along the pavement
and feed the street sweeper’s ravenous mouth.
The shape of the leaf is the shape of the tree’s desire.
Human hands grasp only what will fit our fingers’ span.
Pocket knives and alphabets are the two most useful things.
Structure is desire—wings and wishes,
feathers and flight.
On the long way back, she stepped on no ants
and stepped on no cracks,
reciting her wishes silently, each whispered syllable
rising on a flutter of wings,
her little sister quiet in the crook of her arm.
Timothy Walsh (website) has placed poems and short stories in The North American Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Inkwell, New Millennium Writings and others. His awards include the Grand Prize in the Atlanta Review International Poetry Competition, the Kurt Vonnegut Fiction Prize from North American Review, and the Wisconsin Academy Fiction Prize. He has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac and has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize. He is the author of a book of literary criticism, The Dark Matter of Words: Absence, Unknowing, and Emptiness in Literature (Southern Illinois University Press) and two poetry collections, Wild Apples (Parallel Press) and Blue Lace Colander (Marsh River Editions). He is an Assistant Dean at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
qarrtsiluni 