Selected poems
Cloud meditation
Even when I was a child,
I had a distinct intuition that I had lived
previous lives in which I was trying to
enlighten others around me. I find
most people are not receptive, and, to
an astonishing degree, they think that
they know so much more than I do
when the truth of the matter is that
they know barely anything of what
they speak at all.
I spoke with someone the other day
who told me about a person who gave
workshops on cloud meditations,
that after anyone took a class of his
they looked at the sky differently.
Although when that teacher
wanted to meet with the person
I spoke with at twilight to gain
a different perspective on looking at
the sky, they didn't go since they said
it was too hot at that time of the day.
I neither believe in someone who
teaches cloud meditations,
which resonates with such new age
shallowness it could be what
the Fort River looks like after
a drought summer, with no rain for
six weeks; or anyone who doesn't
follow through on anything due to
the heat at a certain time of day
if it really has the import for them
that they claim. I would trust neither
person with any modicum of truth.
Whatever truth you could offer them
they would hand it back to you, and
say, this isn't truth, this is just
another cloud in the sky.
Whereas, an artist or writer invested
in their craft, a J. M. W. Turner,
painting clouds, and not just
giving classes on meditating on them;
or, myself, might write:
clear summer day —
clouds shapeshift and vanish
over the Peace Pagoda.
Ode to the letter 'A'
Initial vowel
that always reminds us that
we are beginners who are
about to begin, where would
we be without you? How
would our school year
dreams of the best report
cards be without you to strive
toward? Where would our
ability to describe a sneeze
be without the stress on you,
leaving God bless standing
alone as an answer to achoo!
And what about apple?:
the delicious and hardy
fruit of the discontent
in the garden between
Adam and Eve that provides
the first soft syllable before
that lusty crunch past
the skin and into the juicy
white pomaceous flesh?
What would our physicians
do when placing down that
popsicle stick tongue
depressor, as they peer
into our mouths and
look into our throats,
asking us to say ah, if not
for you? Where would
we all be if we didn't have
you to depend on when
we needed to express our
appreciation in our daily
salutations with one another
if we could not even begin to
utter auf weidersehen or y'all?
How would we ever possibly
think to start all of the words
that begin with a
in the lexicon of our lives
without you as our red letter?
Mall walker
If you arrive early enough
you can begin your laps before any store
opens, observe the business owners
and staff open for the day. It is
one of your only tacit social connections —
a retiree whom most people have
forgotten or who many no longer want
to see. Although the black and white
linoleum could be called an art deco
pattern, few would even think about its
mesmerising aesthetic. A saw whines
from a storefront closed for upscale design.
The worker whose dropped roll of tape
you fielded several months ago, like
a ground ball, waves in acknowledgment —
and you respond, appreciative of small
reciprocities. There is always someone
new rounding a corner, beginning
a lap of their own, often a pair of women
discussing their worlds, or a prospective
employee carefully holding
their job application as if it were a leaf
from the King James Bible or the Koran.
Sometimes an infrequent regular
comes your way: the professor emeritus
in economics, an octogenarian,
with whom you have traded courtesies.
And there is the young man,
plugged into his ear buds,
with whom you have never spoken to,
just off the bus, sipping his coke,
waiting on a steel bench until he can
begin his shift as a dishwasher
or prep cook, who always waves,
who is as much a part of your day
as you are his. No nationality is
excluded here, no one is castigated
due to gender. By definition
the air conditioned market-place is
of an egalitarian nature.
To window-shop or to purchase
is legal tender. To walk among
the indigent troops of retirees
for the sole sake of exercise is
an act of gratitude for those whose
practice it is to appreciate each
day as if it were the last.
One never knows if the person
you no longer see while walking
the mall is still here or gone
forever. Sterile yet not antiseptic,
the mall glimmers from tiled floor
to the skylights in the ceiling,
as the mall walker's soles step
almost soundlessly, as if over glass,
through a concatenation of the mall's
phantasmagoric aquatic reflections
and its synthetic splendour, a swimmer
swimming through an otherworldly
but fabricated watery glitter.
Reading Tagore
'Nirvana is not the blowing out of a candle. It is
the extinguishing of a flame because day has come.'
— Rabindranath Tagore
Your words find me again this morning
in the cold spring sunlight,
reminding me of when I first found you,
reading the dulcet verses in Gitanjali;
and then later, after spending a night
with a friend on Clipper Street
in San Francisco, taking the bus back
across the Golden Gate,
early the next day, with one
of your books in my hands, having just
had a square of baklava
for breakfast; now over forty years later,
I am still not able to distinguish the taste
of honey in my mouth
from the lyricism in your poetry, as I
rode back to San Rafael,
over the bay in
Marin, Tamalpais a beacon in the near
distance; the green California hills still
lush after the winter rains.
Wally Swist's books include Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love, The Daodejing: A New Interpretation, with David Breeden and Steven Schroeder, Invocation, and The Windbreak Pine. His forthcoming books are The View of the River, Candling the Eggs, and Singing for Nothing: Selected Nonfiction as Literary Memoir.