Amor Caritas
— in the grotto at Saint Gaudens, Cornish, New Hampshire
Before deep purple
water lilies floating in a marbled
pool decorated with fountains,
spouting from two gilt tortoises
on either end,
you rise perpetually in splendor.
Amor Caritas, gilded angel
of endearment and largesse, holding
a tablet over the garlands
woven around the top of your head,
wings and wingtips
reaching upward in an arc above
your shoulders to touch both ends
of the tablet you balance
perfectly and uphold such universal
tropes as peace, devotion to
divinity, good will, evident in your
name, love and charity.
A sash of passionflowers
girds your waist, a cincture for your
streaming pleated gown;
the visage of your face distinctly
womanly in its neither being male or
female, in its invitation to allow
our eyes to linger on the entirety of you
gleaming in gilt,
dazzling in the sunlight; your presence
alit without and within
in an undeniable strength and a purity;
the shimmer of your bronzed elegance
insisting what your angelic radiance
commands in offering that grace
itself is transcendence taking wing.
.
Baccarat Angel
Did I see it
did it see me, in the alcove
of a stall at the antique mall?
It appeared
to hold the light passing
through it, within it, encasing it.
There are many
Baccarat angels; this one
angel with folded arms,
both continuously
receiving a gift, bestowing one
upon us, the light within seeming
fluid and solid
at once, fascination itself held amid
this Belgian leaded glass, fashioned
in an aesthetic
posture that it looks like it has just
changed position, uncannily still
yet about to move
once you step away, until you glance
back again, catching it after it having
landed mid-flight,
the ways the light within it lends
to allure, giving it a sense of now
you see it, now
you don’t, while being there all the time,
mystical, yet something again that
you can pick up,
put down with
the feeling that it has a mind of its own,
a spirit to go
with it, and upon whose fluidity within
will be more than enough for its shape
to shift again,
for it to rise, take wing,
then land wherever it would like,
which is what
it may do, when you’re not
looking, and when you do look, because
you can’t help
but do so admiringly, that its light within
also rises inside you and glows.
.
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. Recent poems and translations have or will appear in Asymptote, Chicago Quarterly Review, Commonweal, The Comstock Review, and Poetry London. His new book, forthcoming from Wildhouse Publishing, is a hybrid work of prose and poetry that concerns itself with caregiving and spirituality, entitled Like Catching Fish in Her Hands.
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Stone Poetry Quarterly 