Sunday, June 01, 2008

Zebras

The black and white stripes blur

due to their quickness and what is tattooed

into the pigment of their hides by racing

through the grainy sands of the equatorial sun.

Who wouldn't intuit streams of their movement,

even before they splash through the pools

of water in the shallows of their quenching?

As they shake off the dust from

their tomahawk manes, they are never any happier

when they gallop over the dry banks of the channel

after they have plashed through river mud.

In this lifetime, when you mail a card to me,

signed: Your Zebra, with stripes

bearing themselves on the front cover,

and the smudge of your kiss a carnelian stamp

pressed onto the back of the envelope,

it makes your stallion whinny.

Whatever scent you that you infused within

allows me to imagine how I would inhale

the aroma of your skin, as we stop in the wind

of our own making, among antelope and gazelle.

Let us run apart from the herd.

Let our stripes blend together

across the grasslands of the Savanna.

May we bask felicitously among irascible hippos.

And, Oh, Darling, may we outrun the lions.

-Wally Swist

Wally Swist's recent poems appear in "Appalachia, From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright" (Lost Hills Books, 2007), Puckerbrush Review, and "The 2008 Lunar Calendar" (Boston: Luna Press). A recording of a poem from his reading in the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival is archived at npr.org. He is a recipient of two fellowships in poetry from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts (1978 and 2003). A documentary film regarding his work was recently released in "The Poets of New England" series (Amherst: AIMS Video Services, University of Massachusetts). Timberline Press will publish his latest collection of poetry, "Mount Toby Poems," in a letterpress limited edition, in late 2008.


 

Monday, March 03, 2008

The Locomotive

She asks me if I will remember our passion.

Seated beside a window in a Pullman,

passing through the countryside in spring,

a signpost of a village flashes before our eyes.

There is a red barn beside the station, a pond

reflecting sky, and pink blossoms falling above

the white chickens. Traveling in the locomotive

of the heart, we must always try to appraise

what we can keep and how much

of the extraordinary we must learn to let go of,

how much of us, as limitless as passion can be,

will remain; how we may be able

to break past that to find ourselves

more aware of a radiance than a blinding light,

destined, as we are, to arrive

somewhere between moving and standing still.

- Wally Swist

Wally Swist's recent poems appear in "From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright" (Lost Hills Books, 2007), Puckerbrush Review, and "The 2008 Lunar Calendar" (Boston: Luna Press). A recording of a poem from his reading in the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival is archived at npr.org. He is a recipient of two fellowships in poetry from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts (1978 and 2003). A documentary film regarding his work was recently released in "The Poets of New England" series (Amherst: AIMS Video Services, University of Massachusetts). Timberline Press will publish his latest collection of poetry, "Mount Toby Poems," in a letterpress limited edition, in late 2008.


 

Monday, December 03, 2007

The New Life

Every morning, a rooster

awakens me to begin my day.

He projects the scratchy

tenor of his voice,

on whose squeaking hinges

doors open to the new life.

Given the chance,

as he has, he would like

to awaken the world,

and as sunlight streams

through the leaves

down the mountain, I rise

from my bed in a cabin

at the bottom of a hill, and

go to work; my dreams

still moist with dew

from the night before.

Rooster, you call the morning

light that illumines

a new beginning, and even

in gray weather, with the rain

of sleet thundering over

the shed's corrugated tin roof,

it is your voice, friend,

that rings out

to affirm the possibility

of weathering any storm.

- Wally Swist

Wally Swist's recent poems appear in "From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright" (Lost Hills Books, 2007), Puckerbrush Review, and "The 2008 Lunar Calendar" (Boston: Luna Press). A recording of a poem from his reading in the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival is archived at npr.org. He is a recipient of two fellowships in poetry from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts (1978 and 2003). A documentary film regarding his work was recently released in "The Poets of New England" series (Amherst: AIMS Video Services, University of Massachusetts). Timberline Press will publish his latest collection of poetry, Mount Toby Poems, in a letterpress limited edition, in late 2008.


 

Monday, September 03, 2007

Walking Stick

Take all away from me, but leave me Ecstasy.

Emily Dickinson

If you make a gift of your walking stick -

make it a thick pine branch,

stripped of the bark -

the one that has accompanied you

on many hikes. Let it be

the one that has secured

your steps on Toby, Grace,

and Lafayette. Brush the wood

with layers of polyurethane

cincture the top with a sash

of wound leather strips,

tied in a bow knot;

then insert hawk feathers

to billow above the woven cords

En prana it

to guide her on a trail in the wild.

By your making it a gift, bless her

as she walks wherever she walks,

so that she may remember:

she is one with everything -

that she is safe whenever she walks.

It is imperfectly fashioned,

unlike your Ecstasy, but it is

designed to remind her of that.

- Wally Swist

Wally Swist's poems appear, or are forthcoming, in Appalachia, Arabesques Review, Lalitamba, Osiris, Rosebud, and The 2008 Lunar Calendar (Luna Press). His books of poems include The New Life (Plinth Books) and The Silence Between Us (Brooks Books). A recording of a poem from his reading in the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival is archived at npr.org. Twice a recipient of fellowships in poetry from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, he also has been awarded three writing residencies at Fort Juniper, the Robert Francis Homestead. A new collection of his poetry, Mount Toby Poems, is forthcoming from Timberline Press in a letterpress limited edition in late 2008.


 

Friday, June 01, 2007

Ode To Open Meadow

This is where wildflowers and winds

blossom and end -

verdure bordered by stone walls,

whose track, worn by farm wagons

piled high with bales of hay,

rises and disappears in morning fog.

Scent of cedar and scrub juniper,

glimmer of stone outcrops -

sulfurs wind a trail between a patch

of purple clover and shoals of anemones,

then alight upon each marsh buttercup

dotting the bluestems.

I am cleansed in watching the quiet ways

of the foraging spotted doe,

how swallows pluck gnats from a cloud

that expands and contracts

beneath Venus and the crescent,

as if I had died and entered the bardo,

that time of blessing

for the soul in between lives.

Wally Swist's poems appear, or are forthcoming, in Arabesques Review (Algeria), Lalitamba, New England Watershed Magazine, Osiris, Rosebud, Sahara: A Journal of New England Poetry, and The 2008 Lunar Calendar (Luna Press). His books of poems include The New Life (Plinth Books, 1998), Veils of the Divine (Hanover Press, 2003), and The Silence Between Us (Brooks Books, 2005). A recording of a poem from his reading in the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival in 2003 is archived at npr.org. He was poet-in-residence at Fort Juniper, the Robert Francis Homestead, in North Amherst, from September 2003 through August 2005.


 

Thursday, March 01, 2007

The Way Up the Mountain

Wrens, finches, and warblers

sing all the way up the mountain.

We identify wildflowers by the color

of their petals: the red spur

of columbine, the pale lavender

of wild geranium. This morning

we name our own flowering,

our voices rising in a chorus

above the hues of blossoms

in the meadow we step into _

the yellow, white, and purple

of wild oats, sarsaparilla, and trillium.


 

Friday, December 01, 2006

The Angel

thinks I need to be awakened

to hear the freight at 3 a.m.

and its lumbering over the tracks

a half a mile down Market Hill Road

in Cushman center, a momentary twinkling

of stars across the bowl of the sky.

The angel's hair streams, as she stands

on a flat bed, the countryside of rime

and ice spread beyond the stiff wings

that rise above her shoulders

and the fluttering of her gown

before the leaden drumming of the freight

drones to a pause in the train's passing.

Light emerges from the angel's face

like the moon rising above the pines,

the index finger of one hand pointing

from where she now leans over

the caboose's railing, bitter wind

swirling beneath the eaves, the spangled

design of icicles and frost flowers

embroidered across her bodice, the edges

of her sleeves, and the hem of her skirt.

The feathery rasp of the angel's voice

steams in a cloud: divine each day,

choose to write words that praise,

that open out of the center of everything.


 

Friday, September 01, 2006

Mystery
By Wally Swist

Somehow I could tell you entered

the cabin, and before I unlock the door,

I check for the extra key beneath

the brick at the southwest corner.

Somehow I know it has been moved-

that it is not where it was before.

I imagine I can inhale the aroma

of your skin within the sweet scent

of the pine this cabin was built with.

I know how your aura moves across

any room, trailing those blue and gold lights-

how you must have listened to the wind

singing through the remaining leaves

of the trees in the late October rain.

I know what appears to be madness

sometimes can be love, that it is

something more inconsistent,

and then even more constant, and always

more beautiful than any of that-

so that it remains a mystery

that no one else, especially

the two of us, can understand.


 

Thursday, June 01, 2006

Among Fireflies
By Wally Swist

I step into the summer evening,

and their blinking lights surround me.

I enter into each wave in the green darkness

of birch and beech, cresting through the needles

of hemlocks, a nebula that expands

around me. I cup some in my hands,

open my palm's cave to see

how they flicker there, and lift them up

to let each go beneath the treetops,

the moon just beginning to rise.


 

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Mount Toby, Spring Thaw
By Wally Swist

The trickle of melting ice
catches in the basin beneath the culvert,
flows ledge to ledge, then descends

the stony bed worn between the banks
of the gorge. Run off flashes
along the shoot of the frozen falls-

the thaw of the brook pausing
across a long table of snow-encrusted rock
before it tumbles over the rim of another.

The sluice slides down the doglegs
of ice, spills ribbons of water that plunge
through the beams of sunlight illuminating

each pool, and where, mid-mountain,
I stop to watch the rippling
water shadow silver the mossy cliffs.


About Wally Swist

Wally Swist is the recipient of two fellowships in poetry from the Connectict Commission on the Arts (1978, 2003). He was poet-in-resident at Fort Juniper, the Robert Francis Homestead, in North Amherst, Mass., in 1998, then from 2003-2005. His poetry has appeared in ''Alaska Quarterly Review,'' ''Connecticut Review,'' ''The Haiku Anthology'' (W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), '' The Yale Literary Magazine,'' and ''Yankee.'' Books of his poetry include ''Veils of the Divine'' (Hanover Press, 2003) and ''The Silence Between Us,'' his selected haiku, published in ''The Goodrich Haiku Masters Series'' (Brooks Books, 2005). A poem from his reading in the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival in 2003 is available at npr.org. We thank him for sharing a poem with us each season.