When We Talk


There are people in this world who have
never been to a Laundromat
because they have too much money,
others because they do not have enough.

There is no one who has stayed away
for lack of dirt, and no one who has never
taken a pill to be happier for lack of sorrow.

I have lunch with women who whisper
of their unhappy marriages,
whisper louder of the marriages of others.

One says, “I was so much in love
when I saw my husband only on Saturday nights.”
The children were children back then.
There was so much to do.

Boredom means we have too much
and somehow not enough.

When another woman talks,
we lift our goblets in unison and smile
at the river of wine coursing
through our certain secret knowledge
that when she says “the real Tony,”
as in the one she used to love,
she means the way he was
when he was with his first wife,
the one from whom she saved him.


  -Sharon Gerald

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