Finding You
“How will I be able to find you?”
you asked me, looking up
into my eyes, more fervently
than I’ve ever seen, your eyes
tearing. I said, “We’ll always
be able to find one another.
You’ll be able to find me,
and I’ll be able to find you.
There is a direct line we have
to each other, from your heart
to mine. So, wherever we are
there will be any number
of ways to get back to the other,”
already feeling the longing
begin to build in my chest.
Upon which, after speaking,
you looked up at me again,
satisfied with the assurance
I had given you, smiling
with such trust I believed
what I announced to you
without any sense of having
just made up a story, but
because I promised to get
the sweetest strawberries
at the market that I would
clean and slice in the kitchen
before I came to see you,
having missed you more
than I could possibly say;
before I drove the roads
in the semi-darkness, and up
the Notch, then back down,
already eager for our seeing
each other tomorrow morning,
when, perhaps, you’d ask me
again about whether
the noise you heard was
inside me, as you looked
at my chest, wondering if
what you heard was in there.
Wally Swist’s new books include Aperture (Kelsay Books), poems regarding caregiving his spouse through Alzheimer’s, and If You’re the Dreamer, I’m the Dream: Selected Translations from Rilke’s Book of Hours (Finishing Line Press). Poems, essays, and translations have appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, Commonweal, Healing Muse, North American Review, Other Journal, Rattle, and Your Impossible Voice. Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012) was co-winner of the 2011 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Competition. He was also the winner of the Ex Ophidia Press Poetry Prize in 2018 for A Bird Who Seems to Know Me.
Amethyst Review 