Wally Swist

Intimacy

I restore myself
in the late afternoon,
the light in the living room
falling through crystal,

the clarity of which
I recall my saying
to you, decades ago,
how I wanted to savor

every second with you,
our relationship nothing
less than unconventional,
more of a marriage,

on so many levels
in the scope of intimacy,
but never in name,
finding myself walking

through the house
without you, your absence
haunting each breath,
my every move.

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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, winner of the 2018 Ex Ophidia Poetry Prize. Recent essays, poems, and translations have appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, Commonweal, Frontier Poetry, Healing Muse, Illuminations, Pensive, Sunspot Lit, and Your Impossible Voice.  Forthcoming titles include If You’re the Dreamer, I’m the Dream: Selected Translations from Rilke’s Book of Hours from Finishing Line Press; Kelsay Books will publish Aperture, poems regarding caregiving his wife through Alzheimer’s.

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