Remembering How to Sit – a poem by Wally Swist

Remembering How to Sit

It’s always a surprise,
despite my attempt to be open
to flexibility, when you forget something
that might be overlooked as being
too simple to even consider,
such as sitting down, so when I ask you
to sit on the padded seat outside

so we can enjoy the summer morning
you have forgotten what it is to sit.
Although I offer, “Just like me,”
as I try to portray how natural it is
to lower oneself into a chair or a bench
and place oneself down, in comfort,
but you take my various ways

of requesting to sit beside me
as a verbal attack, even though
I haven’t raised my voice.
You now decide to actually sit, but place
yourself down on the opposite bench,
glaring at me with pronounced mistrust.
So I decide to not convince you otherwise,

but I do open the large folio regarding
country homes around the world
and am fortunate to show you
photographs of dining room in Greece,
where I suggest we could be served
dolmas, feta, kalamatas, crusty bread,
and fresh tomatoes with olive oil 

for lunch.  You decide for yourself
that this interests you now, and you move
over on your own accord to sit beside me.
We go on to have a memorable and warm
exchange for the remainder of the morning.
You ease into a happiness as you rediscovered
how we are graced in our ability to sit,

how it is that we are able to relax, to 
possibly imagine where we might go 
in being armchair travelers, moving 
from house to house over the globe, 
also to further muse where we might 
meet after our time here has come to 
pass, where we might suppose we would 

rendezvous in seeing each other again,
considering any number of suppositions,
however, intrinsically knowing that 
we would try to find a hospitable place 
where we would remember how to sit, 
then with certainty venture to rise again 
to continue our journey through immensity.

Wally Swist’s recent essays, poems, and translations have appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, Commonweal, Helaling Muse, Illuminations, Pensive, and Your Impossible Voice. Forthcoming titles include If You’re the Dreamer, I’m the Dream: Selected Translations from The Book of Hours, from the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, from Finishing Line Press. Kelsay Books will publish his book, Aperture, poems regarding his wife’s struggle with Alzheimer’s, in the summer of 2025. His book Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012) won the 2011 Crab Orchard Poetry Prize.