After Pablo Neruda, LXXXIX, 100 Love Sonnets
When I die, close my eyelids with your hands.
Touch me with the thermal dryness of your fingers.
I’m grateful that you love me past all reason.
Only lately have I loved you the way that you deserve.
Listen to your favorite singers turned up loud,
the old love songs that always make you moan.
Walk the marsh and smell the sweet decay,
praise the yellow-headed turtle swimming.
Feed apples to the steer who graze the pasture.
I want you to stay in love with life, keep on.
You have so many others here who love you.
Give them weather reports, hand out advice.
Imagine me waiting, though I’m not a believer.
Remember me. Find my poems. You be the reader.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 27, Issue 5.
Margot Wizansky’s poems appear online and in many journals, such as the Missouri Review, Maine Review, Poetry East, Lumina, Inkwell, Quarterly West, and American Literary Review. She has edited two poetry anthologies and won a Carlow University residency in Ireland and a Writers@Work fellowship in Salt Lake City.
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