SPHINX

It occurs to me now that we perceive as would
a mother wakened by a noise.
& this takes time—sixty winters—
& the vision within,
leaning on the open door, left arm outstretched,
lays fire overhead.
The cradled egg, the light through the window
like a sphinx’s wings, or flaming gauze.
The head of a myth, the haunches of a riddle.
& the one who would escape held firmly in hand.
A bird in peril is depicted as a man
biting the throat of its prey,
which does float,
and does approximate
the investigating unconscious,
into which the plumbline is dropped,
& with what love?
Now that I think of it, it’s like a weekly occurrence,
gets lost in a wash of wind.
& the same goes for these affinities
in the recognition of a shared
present or past, which made the night,
& would know mine.
A moving animal,
the flesh rippling forever
into something in the air like one’s own
native feed. & I am lucky, too,
I who have not
by ash fire earth & sun
swooped down upon such difficult beautiful
heads of light, one leaning in & one
leaning back, into something soft
that does not burn.
& this property of the soul is an oil,
which we forget and go on
forgetting—clamped nimbus, out of nothing,
with or without blood.
& just as well, having agreed to play & having lost
every impression, recurrent view.
& on your breast the one blessing,
a leaf that might figure as a mast,
& make the thing a boat.
& wild is the will to be melted,
& I ask that my remembrance be this book,
in difficult light, with a single caress,
wholly awake in animal blue.

Michael Joseph Walsh is the author of A Season (University of Georgia Press, 2026), winner of the Georgia Poetry Prize, and Innocence (CSU Poetry Center, 2022), winner of the Lighthouse Poetry Series. He is the editor of APARTMENT Poetry, and his poems, reviews, and translations have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Guernica, Fence, jubilat, and elsewhere. He lives in Philadelphia.