WANDERING, MAZIDLY BY WALLY SWIST
Neruda writes
that he will wander mazily over all the earth
if his lover leaves him.
He importunes her that
her shadow never disappears into distance on
the beach; and his joy
in love, even in the sorrow
that such connection with another portends,
is not anything that exists
in my life at this time; but
I am filled with Neruda’s mazily wandering
across the momentous sands
of time, as I trod over
the black and gray stones of the driveway in
mud season, soldiering
on in my solitary life,
in my often obscure or sometimes confused
fashion, unaware of
how blue the cloudless
sky is, its reflection replicated in the luminous
puddles of mud, set
with the glitter of wet
stones; knowing as I do that neither I, nor you,
is obscure, as confused
as we might be, occasionally
made all that much larger by our wayward
diversions in following our
soul’s journey, under whose
blue sky we might finally realize is filled
by a night that is lit by
an infinite number of stars,
whose light shines long after their deaths,
whose departures are as
perpetual as their eternal
essence, since what has never been born
never truly dies, since it is as
inviolate as what streams forth
from what may even be oblique, which
sparkles as mazily as any star.
