Glancing Erlationship Poem by gershon hepner

Relationships with him are mostly just as glancing
as his own with his life,
the only moments that he feels to be enhancing
the ones spent with his wife,
which does not mean he is a hermit husband, but
at all the world but her
he merely glances. From her eyes alone not shut,
with her he’ll often purr
like cats that he adores, yet only inwardly,
for no one else can hear
the sound of the vibrations when he purrs, for he
will make them only near
to her, and far away from other people who may try
to feel them—he can’t touch
their heart with words they cannot understand. That’s why
they talk of him so much,
but only glance at him. Not one of them can plumb
his depths, made very nervous
by learning that they cannot find him when, struck dumb,
they’ve merely reached his surface.

Inspired by Michiko Kakutani’s review of Anne Tyler’s “Noah’s Compass” (“Late Midlife Crisis, Prompter by a Violent Encounter” in the NYT, January 5,2010:

Over the years, in a succession of funny-sad-usually entertaining novels, Anne Tyler has created a male character instantly recognizable as a distinct species, despite individual variations: a lost soul or self-proclaimed loser who realizes that his life is stalled and who sinks into a low-grade depression-a sad-sack sort of fellow, basically well meaning but detached and more than a little passsive…And now, in “noah’s Compass, ” there’s Liam Pennywell, a 60-year-old former teacher who acts like an old geezer, and who realizes that despite two marriages and three daughters, he has “experienced only the most glancing relationship with his own life, ” that “he had dodged the tough issues, avoided the conflicts, gracefully skirted adventure.” As he confesses to his ex-wife, Barbara, “It’s as if I’ve never been entirely present in his own life.”



1/5/10