I Married You by Linda Pastan

I Married You Linda Pastan –   I married you for all the wrong reasons, charmed by your dangerous family history, by the innocent muscles, bulging like hidden weapons under your shirt, by your naive ties, the colors of painted scraps of sunset. I was charmed too by your assumptions about me: my serenity— that […]

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Plunder by Linda Pastan

Plunder: to a young friend by Linda Pastan On a day of windy transition, one season to the next, you spoke of helping your mother close her house, of the choices you had to make—what to discard, what to keep—as if it were your childhood itself waiting to be plundered.  You kept a Persian rug, […]

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Cousins by Linda Pastan

COUSINS by Linda Pastan We meet at funerals every few years—another star in the constellation of our family put out—and even in that failing light, we look completely different, completely the same. “What are you doing now?” we ask each other, “How have you been?”  At these times the past is more palpable than our children […]

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Prosody 101 by Linda Pastan

Prosody 101 by Linda Pastan When they taught me that what mattered most was not the strict iambic line goose-stepping over the page but the variations in that line and the tension produced on the ear by the surprise of difference, I understood yet didn’t understand exactly, until just now, years later in spring, with […]

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An Early Afterlife by Linda Pastan

 “An early afterlife” by Linda Pastan Why don’t we say good-bye right now In the fallacy of perfect health before whatever is going to happen happens. We could perfect our parting, like those characters in On the Beach who said farewell in the shadow of the bomb as we sat watching, young and holding hands at […]

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