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.]
