Love Poem with Pink Socks by Elisabeth Weiss

Love Poem with Pink Socks

        after Matthew Olzman

So here’s what I’ve got, the reasons why we stick it out
because you wear pink socks and dance alone with abandon at weddings
because you don’t care what anyone thinks
Also, because you know how to wash windows thoroughly
and because you can’t memorize any song lyrics
but know every line of every episode of MAS*H

Because when you left the Himalayan Institute without a mantra
you caressed your tiny undershirt with tallit fringes
that you once wore in Jewish Day School
Before you knew me you knew who I was
You thought my sisters and I were overrated and kind of stupid
Because you drove me to Rhode Island when I was fifteen

You drove me to have my first child in a house north of D.C.
You drove me on the wrong side of dirt roads all over County Clare
Because you think all my problems stem from not ever
taking physics and because you want to live forever
even though this world is burning and because you count out my pills
each week, inject my upper thigh with biologics

empty the dishwasher to save my hands from further erosion
play guitar at night on the porch
because music is what you believe in and because you made me go
to cowboy church outside of Nashville with Ernest Tubbs’ nephew

And one day years ago, when you couldn’t afford to put
more than a dollar of gas in your car and you fell asleep
at red lights and you couldn’t remember which doc box you worked for
while we were riding on the Long Island Expressway
to pick up your paycheck, you never stopped
holding on, even when silence covered us like a quilt

and it felt like nothing was left
even when we had to stagger bills

and take out loans and sunk and almost disappeared
you stayed here, post op, post biopsy, pre-cancerous,
through flare ups, through dense forest, each of us
standing outside the tiny hiss of the universe,
worker bees still drawing nectar from wildflowers.

*

Elisabeth Weiss has been a writing instructor for close to forty years. She’s taught poetry in preschools, prisons, and nursing homes. She’s published poems in London’s Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, The Paterson Poetry Review, The Birmingham Poetry Review, the Lily Poetry Review, SWWIM, Mom Egg, and many other journals. Her chapbook, The Caretaker’s Lament, was published in 2016. Lis worked in New York City in publishing, ran a refugee resettlement organization, and works summers in a house built by a shipping merchant in 1768.