Marty Krasney




If I Fell Asleep

If I fell asleep in the bathtub
and
 slipped beneath the water
would I wake to greet you
when you arrived 
to take me to dinner
or would I still be under so no one
met you with kisses
 at the door
after you drove all that way

and talked as we do over fish and wine

and I would never look like that old man

this morning bent over in a crumpled hat

as he struggled to walk his dog up the hill?


At Dinner in Arches National Park

The doughy ex-CEO, drooling at dinner
,
the fire that must have been in his bright blue eyes

quenched, a bear in Ralph Lauren, hibernating.

His sparkly wife had been so proud of herself

forty years ago, on the design team,

when everyone else was leaving dinner

and he said stay, something I’d like to ask.

The evening ended in his hotel room;

he let the phone ring, unbuttoned her blouse.

They both left the company; she went first,

and for a long time it had seemed worth it.

She sighs, still flirty, still those eighteen years

younger, “Dave’s hiking days are over.”



Marty Krasney has spent most of his professional life in the management of not-for-profit organizations devoted to communications across differences and reimagining leadership, most recently as executive director, since 2010, of Dalai Lama Fellows. He was an English major at Princeton (where his teachers included George Garrett and Edmund Keeley) and pursued graduate work at Michigan, Stanford, and Harvard Business School. He has had poetry published in Tricycle Magazine, and fiction in the Marlboro Review, the Missouri Review, Witness, and frequently in the British journal Areté. [Disclosure: Marty was the editor's freshman roommate in college.]








                                    

 

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