Tag Archives: marriage

Henryland now (a poem)

18 Tuesday Jul 2017

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fun fair

Henryland now

Waiting for Henryland now.
Piano jazz on the family iPod.
Knowing he might walk in
sometime within this very sentence.

Or this one.

…No, not yet, but soon.

Henryland: a funfair
for middle-aged war vets.
I know shortcuts to the sweetest rides,
I know the thrillingest car
on the stroller coaster.
Total access, free chili dogs,
an all-night ticket. No lines,
no crowd. Just my husband, me,
and Oscar Peterson.

Henryland: my latter-day
reward for taking all those classes.
(This thesis took me
thirty years to write.)

Henryland: my recompense.

And in the yard a gallery
of rusted iron: the broken ones.
We don’t ride those anymore.
(People kept getting killed.)
We should haul them to the dump,
I know, but we’re lazy, and, besides,
they’re cenotaphs. They’re modern art.

Someday I’ll write a poem called ‘How
to Love Someone,’ but this might do, for now.

The odd things we love, when we love (a poem)

11 Wednesday May 2016

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dogs

The odd things we love, when we love

Henry cares only for films about humans. Except
when he’s high, when he garners delight and soft
consolation from the documentary adventures

of other mammals. Dogs, in particular, warm his
weary cockles. He loves dogs more than any lover
of dogs I’ve known before, and I don’t mind telling you,

I’ve known my share. If I had nothing else to love
him for (but really there are ninety-seven things,
which I intend to list ad nauseam in future poems–

stay tuned!), I’d love him merely for his earnest
love of dogs.        And yet, if one day he went mad,
and started loving cats (against which I hold nothing,

due to allergy), I’d click my heels and spin around, and
love his love of cats. Because, you know, that’s how
we got here. That’s how it’s worked, so far. Ailuromania*,

to give but one example, becomes just the thing at hand,
the current metaphor: a pin, a peg, a cross, a stake,
a nail–a strong, convenient hook to hang our love on.

millions-of-cats-man2

*ailuromania: a passion for cats

Now (a poem)

01 Sunday May 2016

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puddle2

Now

I pause to think how lonesome-long I’ve felt
that snowflakes never die but merely melt.
And so with us: this small, liquescent love.
We started–aimless, frozen flecks of fluff…

You know the rest, if either does. I’ve guessed
at reasons for our muteness: coalesced–
a lukewarm puddle, now—we know we know
already what the other knows (and more).

We pre-discern the gist of sighs. Each stone
that shocks the other, ripples as our own.
You wake so early, now. I sleep so late,
abiding time till we evaporate.

“A Third Body” (a poem by Robert Bly)

10 Tuesday Feb 2015

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cute-old-cuoples-6

A Third Body

A man and a woman sit near each other, and they do not long
at this moment to be older, or younger, nor born
in any other nation, or time, or place.
They are content to be where they are, talking or not-talking.
Their breaths together feed someone whom we do not know.
The man sees the way his fingers move;
he sees her hands close around a book she hands to him.
They obey a third body that they share in common.
They have made a promise to love that body.
Age may come, parting may come, death will come.
A man and a woman sit near each other;
as they breathe they feed someone we do not know,
someone we know of, whom we have never seen.
                                                     –Robert Bly

Another letting go (a poem)

16 Saturday Nov 2013

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Another letting go

“The one that got away.” The fish that broke free
of the hook. It’s a powerful cliché. It’s the perfect
crushed-into-scrap-metal metaphor for what we all
feel, deep down, how much we worship and long
for whatever we’ve lost. It’s seldom the one who
stayed whom we love most, but the one who, like
the prodigal son, escaped us. My husband got away.
He got away, perhaps, for good. He’s sitting five
feet to my left, reading a book about the Middle
East, but he’s lost to me, and I to him. Not that
I’ll ever tell him this. No, we’ll go on, and we’ll
be happy. Still, it’s a sad thing to give up on
someone, to leave him to drown. But it’s what
you have to do in the end. Henry and I had no
other choice. On his side: I’ve become crazy,
or at the very least, incomprehensible. On mine:
I had to let my husband go because I could see,
far too clearly, that he had already gone. (Yes,
yes, but how arrogant I am to assume he’ll
drown. Everyone knows that fish swim fine.)