Anchorite – a poem by Wally Swist

Anchorite

	for Michael Miller


To find you in your realm,
not noticing I slipped through 
the front door you left open
a crack, bringing bags of groceries 
because you couldn’t go out, 
because you had fallen and were 
healing, my being careful not to 
crinkle the paper bags to alert you
of my entry into your apartment.  
You are revealed to me in 
the heat of composition, making 
your marks on a yellow pad, 
smiling comtemplatively, a faint 
glow around your face, exhibiting
deep quiet as you ply your trade
of making poems, as I accomplish
crossing your threshold to place
the bags of groceries on
the counter of your galley kitchen.
I am grateful to have seen you
in your true element, the practice
of poetry leading you to
your many layered solitude,
an anchorite annotating margins
in an illuminated manuscript,
drawing up the initial letters
to each verse of your poems
with their taut lines, scrubbed 
of any extra verbiage, their intent
to portray the rhythms of life 
in all of their fullness, opening
both the mind and the heart
with the pure strokes of your pen.

Wally Swist’s forthcoming books include If You’re the Dreamer, I’m the Dream: Selected Translations from Rilke’s Book of Hours (Finishing Line Press) and Aperture (Kelsay Books), poems regarding caregiving his wife through Alzheimer’s. Recent essays, poems, and translations have or will appear in Amethyst Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Commonweal, Full Bleed, Healing Muse, Illuminations, La Piccioletta Barca, Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, and Your Impossible Voice. His book Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012) was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2011 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Competition.