Will Walker's Poems

These are the first three poems in my full-length collection, Wednesday after Lunch.

CLEAN SLATE

You know no one. No one knows you.
You sit dumb on a park bench
by some unknown grove of nameless trees.
A small, unaccomplished brass band
plays a wistful march in the distance.

You feel the way a blackboard used to look
after you cleaned it with a fresh,
damp sponge. No streaks, no dust.
Just a little midnight hung on the wall,

the piece of moonless starless sky
you place over your eyes to nap,
a beanbag full of night. That interlude
stretches out into your waking day:

You are not dead, just out of life–
or living in a way that asks
only that you let life pass, that you sit,
quiet as those nearby trees, meditating
on the miracle of photosynthesis, its fruitful silence.

EATING A PEACH

Not by bread alone, they say. Take for example
the perfect peach eaten on a warm day
in September while standing over the sink
in your cool, dark pantry.

It’s a soft fuzzy globe of flesh
blushing pink on one hemisphere,
found this morning under a white awning
at the Farmers’ Market, the scent of orchard dust

still lingering. You wash it just enough to get it wet
then lean out over the sink. The juice
runs down your chin, and you slurp
as you take another bite
because you’re alone in the pantry.
You can almost hear God whispering to you

through the stained-glass water lily that hangs
in the window and floats in a blue oval.
You can almost hear God’s voice
through the air shaft, saying let the juice dribble

down your chin, because juice is meant
to do that and because slurping on your peach
with the juice dripping off your chin
is what it’s all about, the sum total
of everything, your one sure ticket to heaven.

I ONCE WAS LOST

Lulu wants to write a poem,
but it’s not the one you want
to write with its deep thoughts and big words.

She leans against your leg to tell you
about her poem, which will celebrate
her jowls, supple as water, her ears,
inviting as velvet, and her short
black and tan otter-sleek coat.

She wants to add a word about her proud
rib cage set like the prow of a clipper ship.
There’s more she wants in her poem
that you already know about her wayward past

and why this indoors kingdom
where she’s warm and dry is her idea
of Paradise, though smaller
than the park she used to roam.

And the food, she adds, it makes me dance for joy.

These are the first three poems in my chapbook, Carrying Water.

RED SKY AT MORNING

Red sky at morning,
sailors take warning.

–Popular rhyme

There is no shame in this, I say to myself
too often to be telling the whole truth.
This is maturity: find a place
you love past all stages of infatuation,
even past cringing at its limitations and flaws,
and care for it, minister to it in any way
the heart imagines to express this love.

This morning, my chosen task
is picking plastic off the beach,
collecting a sandy sack of the stuff
tossed out as trash, now lying in wait
to choke the birds and seals. Maybe the shame
is knowing I am one of this breed
that tosses trash. Or knowing
that tomorrow in the stillness
of the rising sun this beach will be
dotted with our jetsam once again.
Or deeper still, the shame
of saying I love you, I love you, I love you,
knowing no other words, hearing
only silence in reply.

Ardent and foolish, I want this place to rise up
and swack me with magnificence,
to love me visibly in return.
I want a minor miracle, a brief fly-by
from any special bird or a silver
flash of minnows by the shore.
Walking as I work, I wish
to be stopped suddenly in my tracks.
I want this little world to wink somehow
and say For just this moment, I am yours
and yours alone. Instead I see
a red sun hovering in a dark
canyon of cloud, then dissolving
into a suggestion of impending storm.
The seaweed rolled up along the beach
in ramparts slick as eelskin
tells its own tale of recent turbulence.
Try as I may, I cannot turn
the lapping waves and overcast sky
into a sunny oracle of joy, into anything
more celestial than a warning,
a sailor’s looming sign of heavy weather.

CLAPP’S POND

“This is my religion,” he calls out
over his shoulder from the red plastic kayak
ahead of me. I think he means

this pond with its colonies of ivory lilies
splashed with hopeful yolks
of yellow, lilies that float like emblems

of the final perfection of the soul.
I nod, but–ever the grammarian–I want to interject,
“with due respect, this is your church.”

His religion is the conjuring with his camera,
the way he leans over the bow to catch a shot
he hopes will frame the silence on which we float.

This is my church, too, and my religion
is to conjure a sky out of words,
pictures that might sketch

the way the wind stirs just enough
to tell us we are drifting
on the living waters. And both of us can sense

how clumsily we bumble about our church,
what risk we take disturbing anything
raised up in such a stillness. My friend

clicks on, an ancient shadowcatcher at his trade,
while I finger a phrase or two and wonder
how to protect this place,

how to let myself drift out more often
where silence stills my need for words.
A great blue heron beats by overhead

like an acolyte in a dream.
Hoping to mime his noiseless flight,
soon we’ll paddle back toward home.

STANDING STILL

We may appear a lazy trio, and it’s true
we have no plan, except to stand
on the flats at the start of flood tide
cooling our heals. It’s hot and still,
the sort of day that comes a few times
a year and makes it seem quite rational
to do nothing except to cheer
the industrious incoming tide.

Naturally we talk, to make it seem
that we have a purpose beyond letting ourselves
be surrounded, inch by inch, by the soothing blue
of reflected sky. We stand in a moment
where we feel each headstrong wavelet
ripple past our feet.

Sometimes a stream
of minnows swims past our toes,
or terns flocking nearby swoop low
over an unseen school of fry.
They rise to their striking height
then splash down toward a flash of fish.
We see a gull at a civil distance
standing in an estuary a few feet
from the tide. Picking for snacks, he stamps
his webbed feet as if doing
some half-addled tribal dance.

We’re not lazy, but merely idle, immersed
in the still bay’s surge.
Not knowing where we’re going,
we content ourselves to hover
still as clouds in a Dutch painter’s landscape
floating like islands suspended
in a sapphire sky.

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Will Walker's Poems

These are the first three poems in my full-length collection, Wednesday after Lunch.

CLEAN SLATE

EATING A PEACH

I ONCE WAS LOST

These are the first three poems in my chapbook, Carrying Water.

RED SKY AT MORNING

CLAPP’S POND

STANDING STILL

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