Something in Common It’ll never work, said my friends, and I have to admit When I looked at it that way, Like a spreadsheet or a Venn diagram, They were right: there wasn’t much She liked Eighties europop and I liked Fifties bebop, Which should have scared me off right from the start, I guess She never used chopsticks at a Chinese restaurant And I never could do without them Hot yoga was her idea of cool But I didn’t much relish twisting or sweating, Especially not simultaneously She had fixed opinions about virtually everything And brooked no discussion Whereas I muddled along rounding corners Instead of turning them When she talked – which wasn’t much – It was nuts and bolts in a language that could have been Greek to me (Although it wasn’t) And I couldn’t tell whether my rhapsodic eloquence About the sheen of her hair or the contour of her calf Went over her head or right through her (fetching) ears. But in that in-between time of stars and stillness Things happen Down in the garden beneath our window I could swear we set off a chorus of critters Who have something in common ________________________________________________________________________ Emanuel E. García, Leaf Thoughts, One Hundred Poems, 2013 |