The Sewing Table
It creaks at either end
if you don’t hold on
to it from underneath
when you move it
and we move it often
around the small kitchen.
Pine plank with engraved
six-inch rulers burned into to it
on both of the long sides
so that the apparel sewers
could calculate quickly.
Measuring a full yard long
and nineteen one half inches wide,
we’ve had thousands of meals
on it, written cheques, lists,
and poems over it, placed a laptop
across it to view only the finest
of films, made translations
of Lorca’s Andalusian Songs
and of the pure poetry
of Jimenez, following
his suggestion of always writing
by going against the grain.
Where we have experienced
coming into the grace
of the colored orbs of angels
and the delight of speaking
for what sometimes seems
like forever with the best
of friends on the phone
while we lean on our elbows
over the wood worn smooth
by the ritual of daily use,
with wash cloths and palms
of our hands; and where
we have been able to
recount what we forget
and forget what we could
no longer remember,
where we’ve looked through
the kitchen windows to see
flocks of birds cross the sky
and for you to become
the professor of clouds,
as you inform me what kinds
and which shapes float by
over our little sewing table
and the story of you and I.
~
Brown Swirl Door Handle
Victorian, Late 1800s
The question, “What does it open?”
immediately springs to mind,
but as significantly, “Who sawed
off the handle from the door
in a perfect square.” The wood
is a rough pine, most of the white
paint chipped away, but what
of the lovely handle, and to where
might it had opened and lead,
what reality, what fiction?
Where might it bring us to now?
Might it not lead to John’s
anecdote that he shared with Tevis
about how he first became interested
in antiques, how he would play,
as a boy, in the sunroom of his
grandparents’ house on Long Island,
among the shine of polished wooden
furniture and brightly stenciled walls;
or might it also lead to Tevis’
Aunt Mildred and Uncle Stan’s home
in South Redding, Vermont,
from which she peered from an upstairs
bedroom through a heating grate
to see Mildred popping corn and Stan
flipping flapjacks, only to revisit
decades later to the perpetual surprise
of the house seeming so small,
when as a girl it loomed large and tall.
Might not the brown swirl door handle
lead us to the space within space
and a time contained in time where both
John and Tevis could so amicably meet,
as they do, in which both could turn
the brown handle of a door that opens
into not an empty room but the charmed
showroom of Windham Antique Center,
on Village Square in Bellows Falls, where
they are prone to exchange their anecdotes
and passion for antiques, where they bask in
the sunlight of the moment, turning the knob
and releasing the bolt of an unseen door,
which opens into the resonant memories
of childhood that not only endure in
their own minds but also are now lit in yours.
~
Doe
Opening the blinds
to see you in the mist,
browsing remaining green leaves
in the October tree break,
you turn your head
slowly towards us,
aware you are being observed,
but are at peace
satiating your hunger.
Were you the fawn
I stopped traffic
on the road a year ago
so that you could cross?
You who captivates us so
by your tawny presence,
not even an inclination to bolt,
apparently welcoming us
to your world
of grace and gratitude, until
it is time for us
to continue with our day,
and I begin to tidy the kitchen
after our own breakfast,
when I look up to see that you
have gone deeper into
the leaves, just
your head showing,
then upon lifting my eyes again
you are gone, having disappeared
into a seam amid
the branches of the trees,
only mist rising upward
where you had been,
somehow concealing yourself
among the open views.
You are just as you are,
elusive in your ways,
not unlike Tevis’s memory
loss, always surprising
in her being able to recall
a memory, then for it
to vanish again, reappearing
as you reappear, briefly,
to emerge and then stray
apparently without even a trace.
~
Disappearances
You have brought out
the mattress pads you have stored
in the linen closet and moved them
to where we are unable to walk
around the bed. You move
boxes two flights down
to the basement and stack those
amid golden candlesticks
bearing tall white candles,
lighting the semidarkness with
their glimmering metal bases,
their round handles filled
with emptiness. You were
a librarian, an archivist who
curated Emily Dickinson
and Robert Frost, always
meticulous in your manner,
now your brain change
has left you muddling through
the file cabinets in your brain.
I observe your mind surge,
even shift, in its attempt to give
order to the disorder,
the savages of dementia
that are emptying your ability
to recall the memories
of your life, to remember what
goes where, where you did
what in which place, the string
of the current conversation
disappearing not just once
but several times, each time
needing repeating so that
you might understand,
no matter how slowly or how
calmly stated, the words
and meaning of our exchange
seeming to disappear even before
I just finished speaking them.
~
Shadow Play
You and I were on a beach,
the sand smooth as putty,
the crash of waves ending in lacy
foam at Acadia in Downeast Maine
more than twenty years ago.
You challenged me to a game of who
could gather the most sand dollars.
There were so many scattered
across the beach by the edge of the sea
it astonished us, and I was winning
when a man appeared, apparently
out of nowhere, and handed you
several sand dollars so that
you could beat me, both of us standing
and looking at each other in amazement,
and when we looked around the man
had vanished without a trace.
We thought he might have been
an angel, but now so many years later
I pause to think that not unlike
the man who handed you the bounty
of sand dollars we have had
been given the gift of grace
more times than we can remember
and much like the disappearance
of the man on the beach
your memory has nearly disappeared
to the degree that when I shared
my memory of the sand dollars
you lifted your head and peered into
distance, and relayed you could
barely remember that at all,
making me think what you saw
when you squinted your eyes
were only a cast of shadows at play.
~
Christness
Its suchness can be found
in wandering the empty
streets just before the dawn.
Luminosity isn’t something
that we think of as being
hidden, but its depths can be.
What it is that releases it
is compassion, as in listening
to your partner’s confabulation,
or the story her mind has
made up, about going to visit
the elderly woman who lives
in the yellow house at the head
of the street, the one who leaves
the front porch light on,
or in how your partner struggles
to remember now, how that
for her is like trying to catch fish
with her hands, her mind aswirl
and the iridescent water
rocking and rocking around her.
~
Wally Swist’s books include Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2011 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Competition, and A Bird Who Seems to Know Me: Poems Regarding Birds and Nature, winner of the 2018 Ex Ophidia Poetry Prize. He has published several books of nonfiction, including On Beauty: Essays, Reviews, Fiction, and Plays (Adelaide Books, 2018), Singing for Nothing: Selected Nonfiction as Literary Memoir (The Operating System, 2018), and A Writer’s Statements on Beauty: New & Selected Essays & Reviews (Shanti Arts Publishing, 2022). Recent poems and translations have or will appear in Asymptote, Chicago Quarterly Review, Commonweal, The Comstock Review, and Poetry London. Shanti Arts published his translation of L’Allegria, Giuseppe Ungaretti’s first iconic book, in August 2023.