Different Slants

Love from the Abyss

by Robert M. Katzman © February 14, 1988

Written for my love, my wife, in 1988, after ten years of marriage and after nearly three years of my unemployment, when deeply depressed I learned what happens to a guy who received twenty years of great publicity running a once famous Bob’s Newsstand, and then found out nobody would hire someone like me. They said, like a line of robots: “Well, you’ll leave as soon as you can to start over.”

One month later, I was hired to manage Europa Bookstore at 3229 N. Clark Street, in BoysTown, Chicago

Discovered among her papers last night, I wanted to give Joy a Valentine, and this is what I wrote for her thirty years ago, today. We were both 37. It rhymes, but so what? No other person has ever seen it. We, our love, and our marriage survived:

Our balances are red

Your mood sometimes blue

After ten years of marriage

My Valentine to you

Never mind Valentine was Catholic

And I a wandering Jew

Today’s meant to be a ‘Day of the Heart

To give praise, or sometimes to rue’

You cook and clean

And sew and spank

For such a life

You have me to thank

While your pretty blonde head

Wears no diamond crown

You know if ever you need me

I’ll always be around

Our love can’t be a balance sheet

Where one thing equals another

How do you measure my loyalty and love

Against checks I sometimes can’t cover?

Our kids have a Father and Mother

For the good times and the bad

To cheer them on when they do well

And hold them when they’re sad

Marriages isn’t all soft puppies

Sunlight streaming thru a window

Not all pot roast and holiday cheer

Not victory over each foe

More like anxious moments

Of pregnancies and pain

Struggling through a wilderness

Where nothing’s ever the same

Choices and decisions

More often wrong than right

Regret, regret and regret again

Lying silently awake at night

I’m grateful for our children

For their beauty and their health

Their intelligence and humor

Is our legacy and wealth

Though our home is not a castle

And our car is barely alive

Don’t measure our lives in metal and brick

Don’t stand in our doorway and sigh

Don’t pine for the things you haven’t

Don’t dwell on longing for jewels

Many a woman rich in silver and gold

Would gladly trade for my love for you

Hug me for no reason

Cause you’re luckier than you know

Hold my hand as we face what’s ahead

For we’ve so many years to go

***

Thanks for reading this buried love letter.

Hope you all find someone like Joy

Happy Valentine’s Day

Bob Katzman

 Valentine To a Wounded Wife

Written February 12, 2016, twenty-eight years later, as she was gradually dying

My way of writting poetry to her, had evolved