MY WIFE IS BEAUTIFUL AND I AM GLAD
Written on her birthday card: July 16, 2010
You say that beauty lasts a day.
I say a day’s what we inhabit.
The fact that beauty wears away
Confirms how wise I was to grab it.
So though her looks are merely mortal,
I’ll frolic like a love-struck lad
And seize the fleeting joy and chortle:
My wife is beautiful and I am glad.
You say I mustn’t judge her worth
By chance genetics. But you see,
I merely like her
lucky birth:
I love the
way she married me.
And though this disconcerting kindness
Makes you shout, “She must be mad,”
I celebrate selective blindness:
My wife is beautiful and I am glad.
It’s true we make a funny twosome,
Her all loveliness and I
An ancient wrinkled wart, so gruesome
You declare, “In god’s name why?”
But I reply: This silly spite,
Resenting what you’ve never had,
Promptly doubles my delight:
My wife is beautiful and I am glad.
I’m glad, though mortal flesh is sinful
And outer grace defers to inner.
Of beauty’s balm I’ll sink a skinful
And reel around, a blissful sinner.
I’m sorry if your
wife is ugly.
I’m sorry if my boasting’s
bad.
I’m sorry but I’m sorry smugly:
My wife is beautiful and I am glad.
HOUSE END
Where the autumn wind whips round
The house end, four floors above ground,
I’m an old man upside down.
Storms in the far north
Gather for their going forth,
And since such creatures slip
A blade through the least nick
No mere measuring will do
To make my windows tight and true.
Therefore I hang
And shape and shave and smooth and sand –
Quickly, quickly, since I race
The planet’s winter-turning face.
Oh, its old face turns winterward
But yet my darling shall be warm
If I’m away, and can’t get home.
FOR MY FATHER, WHO DIED
YOUNG
What should I reply –
Lost between living and dead,
And meeting his kindly eye –
If he, insistent, said:
“How do you
fill, my lad,
Years I
never had?”
“Oh, sleep and eat,” I’d say.
“Work, if I must, alas;
And travel in the modern way
Helps the years pass.
Much like,
it’s true
A million others do.”
But what then if he
In the dim daybreak
There, by the grey sea
That slides between sleep and awake,
Seemed with
his quiet air
Still
doubtful there?
I’d say: “Look what I made –
Roads, that railway track:
Seven years with spade,
And sweat, and bent back –
Though
doubtless nothing more
Than you,
long before.”
But then, feeling my days
Of thin stuff dismissed
Under his troubled gaze,
At last I might resist:
“Born
provincial, poor and plain,
I built a life
with back and brain –
What more could I give,
What could any man do,
That your old bones might live?
Could I fill the years for two?
Look how far
I came
With neither
money nor name.”
But the morning is silent now
As I wake to that same task –
To wonder again how
I’d answer what he cannot ask,
Feeling
still that I
Somehow
should reply.