ANNIVERSARIES IN BOTH MAJOR AND MINOR CHORDS

The Betty Poems

Eighteen years ago
today, I was waiting
for a plumber
to unclog
and rewire
the pumps
that kept my heart
beating. He did
a good job.
A year later,
to the day,
I was married
and she helped
to keep it beating
for almost a decade
more. She, of course,
had the harder
and more complicated
job and
she did a good one, too.
It seems like
a hundred years
before that, I was a kid
coveting Cherry Bombs,
Ashcans, and Black Cat
firecrackers to squirrel
away and explode,
devil-may-care
on our ridiculous day
of Independence.

Now, my celebrations
are daily: tying
my sneakers, brushing
my teeth, supporting
myself. But my most
celebratory act
and most important
is loving a woman
who loves me
back.
How she does it
and why
is the most scary
thing of all.
Not having to do,
but being done;
not having done,
but doing. A simpler
complexity was always
my unraveling.
Perhaps her distance
has brought me nearer?
Perhaps my years
has made me younger?
Perhaps my confusion
has made me teachable?
What I do know--
as much as we're able
to really know anything--
is that love always comes
as a surprise,
and as a gift,
and must be untied slowly,
delicately
as if a child, late at night,
was talking, whispering really,
to God
who was somewhere
inside
his own
clasped
hands.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2013