You Must Meet My Wife Poem by gershon hepner

YOU MUST MEET MY WIFE, DARLING LINDA


You must meet my wife, darling Linda.
She livens my days and my nights
and propels me while seeming to hinder
my poems. On each one she writes:
"The meter is wrong and the rhymes,
most of which, I admit, are quite clever,
seem forced to me too many times,
which I do not think that you should ever
be doing to rhymes, or to gals
to whom your eyes too often wander."
We're lovers, and far more than pals,
and even today I am fonder
of her than of others who deaden
my days, even though she won't praise
my verse when she thinks it is leaden.
Though this happens she still can amaze
me in other ways, and often does,
and that's why I think you should meet her.
I am sure you will, too, get a buzz
like the one that I get when my meter
and rhyme are both perfect for her,
and I feel I'm on top of the world,
parsed by her having caused her to purr
as together our minds are both curled.

Inspired by "You Must Meet My Wife, " by Stephen Sondheim, a show whose revival in Glencoe, IL, receives a rave review by Terry Teachout in the WSJ,7/6/12 ("A Night To Remember") :

YOU MUST MEET MY WIFE

She lightens my sadness,
She livens my days,
She bursts with a kind of madness
My well-ordered ways.
My happiest mistake, the ache of my life:
You must meet my wife.
She bubbles with pleasure,
She glows with surprise,
Disrupts my accustomed leisure
And ruffles my ties.
I don't know even now quite how it began.
You must meet my wife, my Anne.
One thousand whims to which I give in,
Since her smallest tear turns me ashen.
I never dreamed that I could live in
So completely demented, contented a fashion.
So sunlike, so winning,
So unlike a wife.
I do think that I'm beginning
To show signs of life.
Don't ask me how at my age one still can grow-
If you met my wife, you'd know.

7/6/12 #10731