All in by Susan Rich

To Talk of Age

SWWIM Every Day
by Susan Rich

by Susan Rich



like the finest wine I’ve never tasted—
perhaps the tang of a Montepulciano.

How the liquid looks full-bodied,
catches light as it breathes.

We stare as if into a still life,
watch our sommelier pour

the complex, expensive taste
on the edge of a dome-shaped glass.

O, to be admired like that—
desired for stable ankles, softening

bellies, healthy breasts.
Sixty-one and still here. At the party,

I meet a man with hair,
check his hands: perhaps mid-eighties?

But I see the earlier version
call me honey, carry my packages

from the car. What if
we could see the octogenarian,

as delicious as a Shiraz,
bold, buttery, rare;

perhaps in the body’s limitations
we might transform

into a tribe of small kindnesses—
our extended outlooks reconfigured

into art installation or tableaus
underneath cool sheets—

long fingers still entering
the bungalows of our bodies.

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Susan Rich is the author and/or editor of nine books including Blue Atlas (Red Hen Press) and Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems (Salmon Poetry). She is editor of Birdbrains: A Lyrical Guide to Washington State Birds (Raven Chronicles Press). Her poems appear in Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere.

Dear Doctor,

SWWIM Every Day
by Susan Rich

by Susan Rich


Before the first quarter note
from the chorus you sing

delivers me musicals or psalms,
the day may irridesce

into an island razzle dazzle—
another Barukh atah Adonai

or a category six hurricane.
In your timbre: the certain heartbreak

or heart remake raging
at the end of a cordless line.

Doctor, may you be my once and only
dip into oncology and may this late

afternoon callback signal
our final sentences together.

Between us—the lamp of my life and
the diagnosis marks where I exist—

readied to return to the illuminated trees.

And so I set the phone to silence—
watch the kern as she crash-lands into the sea.

______________________________________________________________________

Susan Rich is an award-winning poet, editor and essayist. She is the author of four poetry collections including, most recently, Cloud Pharmacy and The Alchemist’s Kitchen. In addition, she co-edited, with Ilya Kaminsky, the anthology The Strangest of Theatres, published by the Poetry Foundation. Rich has received awards from Peace Corps Writers, PEN USA, and the Fulbright Foundation. Recent poems have appeared in the Harvard Review, New England Review, Poetry Ireland, and World Literature Today. Her fifth collection, Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry, Spring 2022. Visit her at poetsusanrich.com.