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Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts

Thursday, July 1, 2021

On the Occasion of Our 10-year Legal Marriage Anniversary

Twenty-nine years together

A decade of legal marriage

Pat's tapered hands

Can't wear our wedding ring

During swims.

On our first date, Pat said,

"You'll never find anyone

Better than me."

Pat doesn't get poetry.

Maybe if she's the subject,

It will make better sense.

Paris, a Chicago dance club,

Was the site of our earliest

Classically romantic moments.

Pat would slow-dance with me,

her eyes, messaging mine.

Pat says she lured me with

Her cooking, and that's partly

True.

All these years, and four homes

Later, she encouraged me to 

Continue loading water into the

Redbud gators in the deep sun of

This Memphis July morning by

Calling to me from the front step,

"I'm making you an omelet with

Baby bella mushrooms."

Saturday, February 15, 2014

Valentine's Day Weekend Prose Poem

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Love Sickness Healed

It started last weekend when I read Gary Shteyngart's reminiscence on
Falling in love with Becky (Scroll down) while reading *Tom Sawyer* at nine.
Flashed back and realized that I felt similarly moved...or maybe I fell in love with
Romantic love then. It was the literary version of the awakening I felt at 10 -- and
I've mentioned this here before -- when(ever) I heard Minnie Riperton sing, "Lovin' You".

Earlier this week, I read Karl Ove Knausgaard's "Come Together" in "The New Yorker" and
Identified with both the boy and the girl, but especially the boy, who was smitten with
The girl, but didn't know how to handle it gracefully. I identified with the girl because
I had been in hapless kissing situations with boys during bar mitzvah parties when we were
In middle school, where I felt I was supposed to count on the boy to know what he was doing.

Yesterday, a boy from my Modern Orthodox Jewish day school sent me email -- a boy with an
Identical twin brother, and whom I hadn't seen since I was 17, during my dad's funeral and
We didn't speak then, just mourned; we hadn't talked since we were 13, when we graduated and went off to different high schools. I called him and we had a warm conversation. I hung up,
Trying to remember which twin was the one who might have had a crush on me back then.
I felt sad. Wistful.

Why couldn't I have been heterosexual and have ended up with him, or my Israeli, male,
Childhood friend, or my high school/early-college boyfriend, or the new Lehigh alumnus I met
In New Rochelle at the Young Jewish Singles Dance the summer before my Junior year of college,
Or any of the men I met during my year in Jerusalem at 20? Why did I fall for Tom Sawyer's
Girlfriend? Why did "Lovin' You" feel like it was being sung to me? Why did I want to kiss my
Female day-school classmates more than my male ones?

Why couldn't I have been someone else? Isn't that what I'm asking? How ungrateful, if
Reasonably human-nature-ish. Suddenly, I feel the urge to find out which classic rock band
I am via a Buzzfeed quiz. (The Eagles.) And then I hear my beloved wife, laughing heartily
Downstairs. I'm drawn to learn more.

Saturday, January 9, 2010

Love Poem 2.0

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies.

Love Ballad

Who's That Lady both of us wondered
Our Day Will Come, we hoped and then
I Need Your Lovin' I declared, though with more subtlety
Ultimately, I affirmed, I Found Lovin'
Rush Over, you did, and swiftly, I'm in Love
My Cherie Amour, I Like What You Are Doing to Me
You're the Best Thing Just the Way you are and
Still a Thrill

Monday, August 31, 2009

Monday Morning in Ogunquit

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

A Poem

Sparkle-sea, sparkle, do
Stratus-cloud, straddling sky
Nearer on the porch, a curly-white dog
Lying in the sun
Soaks up rays, so he can solar-power his
Trot around the house.
In-between the dog and the sea,
A garbage-truck rumbles by.

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Cat Company

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

Pat's with David & Gerard

The girls are keeping me company on and off -- they swirl in and out of the room as I sit here, wishing for either of them to hop on my lap. Now, they're gone again. Am I being punished for getting home later than usual tonight?

Tonight, I'm finally pausing to try to read through the small book of my grandfather's Hebrew poetry that my aunt gave me when I lived in Jerusalem at 20. It contains 28 poems and I can understand only one stanza of the fourth one: "Chedri ("My Room"):"

Kal ha'adam li zar
Kal ha'olam li tzar
Oolam tov li m'od
B'toch chedri ha'kar
.

Every person is a stranger to me
All the world is sorrowful to me
But it's very good for me
In my cold room.

Not too cheery! I never knew my grandfather. Now, I get to know him a little through the pieces of his poetry that I can make out.

Pat's home and the kitties are also commanding my attention!