LOVE POEMS AFTER FIFTY YEARS
by
Gerald M. Weinberg
SMASHWORDS EDITION
* * * * *
PUBLISHED BY:
Gerald M. Weinberg on Smashwords
Love Poems After Fifty Years
Copyright © 2010 by Gerald M. Weinberg
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Table of Contents
Love Poems After Fifty Years
Preface
Part_1_Before the Divorce
Part_2_After the Divorce, but Before Meeting Dani
Part_3_After Meeting Dani
Epilogue
Love Poems After Fifty Years
Preface
Dani and I are now in our fiftieth year of our marriage. This book celebrates those fifty wonderful, passionate, remarkable years.
Early in 1960, I was divorced from my first wife. We had four children–daughter Quincy, and sons, Chris, Nick, and John Keats. When I first met Dani in September of 1960, I was immersed in emotional turmoil over losing my family. I had always believed we were bonded "until death do us part," but to my shock, my first wife thought differently. Indeed, my turmoil was so great that I began writing poetry, something I had not attempted since college.
I've divided this little book into three sections: before the divorce, after the divorce, and after meeting Dani. Looking over the poems in each section, with the perspective of time, I can now understand my own poems better than I could then.
Perhaps some of my young readers can learn from these words, these poems, this history, and not experience quite the pain I carried with me way back then.
Part_1_Before the Divorce
But not before the storm clouds were gathering. I can now see that even before the divorce, something was seriously wrong in my first marriage something that was not consciously visible to me then. But I was not totally unaware.
Some of this depressing setting was further darkened by the sudden death of my best undergraduate friend, John Sullivan. John paid for his education at the University of Nebraska by serving in Naval ROTC (in Nebraska? Yes.). He repaid the Navy by serving as a fighter pilot in the Reserve. We had lost track of each other after college, until we met by coincidence at a chamber music concert in the Phillips Gallery, in DC. After a rousing evening in the city, we made an appointment to meet in two weeks. The following week, he was scheduled to fly. He never made our appointment.
Though there are only four poems in this section I'm sure I wrote more than I did not retain. It was my practice at the time to give the poems to Patty, my wife. Technology was different in 1959. Even our highly advanced technology office, we were only just then getting our first copier. If I wanted copies of the poems, I had to make carbons–a dreadful bother that 20-year-olds these days cannot imagine. So, quite often I gave my wife my only copy of a poem. What she did with them I do not know. And, after more than 50 years, I certainly cannot remember what they contained.
Consequently, what you see in the first section is merely a small sampling of the poetry I was writing in those days. Still, I think you can see even in the small sample of what was going on for me in my marriage. Take a look.
The Label (Late 1958, exact date unknown)
This soothing balm,
Safe for tender mucous membranes of the mind
Is GUARANTEED.
CAUTION:
A slight drying of the tissues may occur.
If the salve fails,
Once in a while, when the wounds are precious,
Would the purchase price be refunded?
(And the moisture?)
On A Rock (Spring, 1959)
On a rock,
Restrained from the water by a rust-reddened rail,
You sit,
Guarded by the aloofness of your book.
Though the pencil adds the proper finality,
I know you are not reading as you think of me,
Passing.
We both wish I could bring myself to speak,
But my mouth is occupied,
Mashing a pretzel,
Sharing its moisture with the salt.
No Diving (Summer, 1959)
A waste of paint,
No better than TEDDY ’55 who sought immortality with tar,
And now yields unknowingly to the imperturbable wave,
His hope.
We cannot plunge into that vague green liquid,
There are rocks–
Not even deep enough to hide beneath the sun’s reflection.
Once, when the sun was brighter,
Before a thousand TEDDYS,
Yet after a thousand thousand,
We were here together,
And could not speak.
To John Sullivan (December, 1959, between Christmas and New Years)
I
How could it be,
How, John, could it possibly be,
That a letter–
For whose reading I could not delay this morning
In my rush to the public library–
To my wife,
From her literary friend in Berkeley (three thousand miles away)),
Who heard from a mutual acquaintance in San Francisco,
Casually commenting on a clipping
Received over a month ago from his love–
Whose name I happen to know–
In Lincoln,
Tells me you are dead.
II
It caused me no wonderment that
When, after six years of ever decreasing frequency of thought
And absolutely no correspondence
(One fall, I remember),
At three a.m.,
We elected Harold the champion non-writer of the summer,
To break a three-way tie),
We found ourselves face-to-face
With the same Daumier.
We talked about your bandaged foot and crutch
As if you had fallen since we parted,
The day before.
III
Without the Daumier,
My heart in its leaden way,
Would have absorbed the bitter blow,
Much as we absorbed "not-Harold"–
To bagpipes.
But now my mind is in the act,
And ...
I am ashamed to let it in,
For it befouls the atmosphere
Of your last beautiful act,
Your Icarian descent.
IV
"Try to be objective,
It's nice of you to try to put mythology in this poem,
Maybe you could even bring in Brueghel,
Somehow,
To honor are as well as literature.
He loved them both,
He taught you both,
As you taught him.
And do not even be afraid to do it badly,
For he never ridiculed your worst efforts,
Only your best.
But let's be honest,
For all you know, the plane exploded
On the ground.
One really can't expect to get the whole story,
As for a six-month pregnancy
In a seven-month marriage."
V
Death is the whole story,
And yet the part I cannot understand.
I can understand
The Christmas card,
Unopened Modigliani
Which was supposed to impress you
And embarrass you
Into making an appointment.
The six years.
The Daumier.
I can even understand the public library,
But they do not belong,
And Death I can't absorb.
Part_2_After the Divorce, but Before Meeting Dani
In this interval, I was busy with work on building the tracking system for the Mercury Project, the first American astronaut in space. I worked in Washington, DC, where my children lived, and in Bermuda, where we were installing an essential component of the tracking system.
Some of these poems were written in my stark, lonely apartment in Foggy Bottom (later to be made famous by Richard Nixon). One was written on a business trip to Milwaukee, where Patty and I had spent one summer just after we were married. Milwaukee was where our first son, Chris, was conceived. At virtually every corner of that city, the visit caused me no end of painful memories.
Other poems were written in Bermuda–romantic Bermuda swarming with honeymooners from New York. There were no single women vacationing at the Castle Harbour. All the women, I naively thought, were just married, and thus safe for me to talk with. Little did I know how many newly married ladies badly needed sympathetic counseling from a (supposedly) experienced male.
Later, Dani and I we took our honeymoon in Bermuda, but not at the Castle Harbour, where I was too well-known to the staff and too shy to take my honeymoon right there in front of all my friends.
Reflections From A Black Window–High Up (May, 1960)
Who are we?
Hidden in a hundred niches of the city:
Some above, gazing like gods,
Others keeping obscurity by living low,
Close to the earth we honor,
Close to the people we love.
Out of the glassy surface
We sometimes leap–
A heart must escape dark waters
When it holds a certain secret–
But we learn to swim in silence
And so avoid the nets.
We are men,
Yet we must spread our seed in these waters
Lest we should spill it on the ground,
Thinking to fertilize the earth,
Or worse, should spend it on one woman,
While seeing the same illusory result.
In the water,
Any egg may receive the spark of life–
Or none at all.
We are constrained to spawn unseen,
Unknown and not knowing the result
But not ashamed of the act.
You and I, the Sun, Bermuda (June 26, 1960, Castle Harbour, Bermuda)
Yesterday we were crabs
Scuttling sideways on salt-sharpen'd coral
And thus will be tomorrow.
Today, ah, today,
The sun melted us into a silver minnow
Flashing among the rainbow anemones,
Our crustacean memory merging the million colours,
The subtlest perfumes escaping the imperfections of our fish's form.
A hundred years of such sun
May break the shell-like fortress
And make us into a pair of ruined castles,
Exchanging lovers' looks across the foaming inlet
while beautiful crabs scuttle o'er our coral walls,
Eternally.
Night Rain (June 25, 1960 Castle Harbour, Bermuda)
Toads tremble on the rain-wet grass
That caresses our forgotten feet
Like fingers exploring on another's hands.
Conceived on a palm stem
And born from its leaf
A drop of rain anoints your brow
And cools the fire my lips have kindled there.
But water so born
Is but added fuel to fires like ours,
And the night trembles
At the hint of conflagration.
Milky Way (June 28, 1960 Castle Harbour, Bermuda)
Above, the countless stars,
Unspeakably grand,
Obscuring the red jewel, Mars–
Below, your sweet warm hand.
Toward the million-trillionth star,
Our minds may soar aloft,
But never can our hearts be far
From fingers, pulsing, soft.
Far galaxies,
Near ecstasies,
With equal grace
Do show our place.
Youth (July 25, 1960 Castle Harbour, Bermuda)