An English Teacher's Wife: A Letter Poem by Suzanne Hayasaki

After Ezra Pound After Li Po

When my hair was long and glossy
And I sat sketching with pencil and pad
In the lobby of our dormitory
And you walked by, sopping wet,
Black hair flopping over dripping glasses,
I saw only a foreign man.

When I was 22 and you were 30,
I brought you home at Halloween,
And you carved a pumpkin
And ate what was heaped on your plate
To please my parents.
And still I saw only a foreign man.

By the time spring came
I loved you
But it was time for you to leave
And I was in-between
Which made you seem like a distant dream.

Months of waiting and unknowing passed
And then I was in your land
And yet utterly alone.
Hours away by train,
You sounded so distant on the phone,
You seemed so different from the man I'd known.

Years passed
But I never left your land
In time, I learned your words,
I entered your world.
I accepted your mother under our roof
We loved and struggled
And kept our discontents pressed down,
Unexpressed, and got on with life.

But as the years have passed,
My complaints have faded,
Still aching on a rainy day,
But covered over with the scar tissue
Of the triumphs and tragedies of life
Celebrated or survived together.

And now that my hair is growing gray and dull
And our students' faces remind me of how lined ours are,
I am sometimes reminded that I was once that young
And sat across from a man as unreadable to me as Li Bai's calligraphy
And, as the days passed, came to see someone I could trust enough
To follow across the sea
And never leave.