"A Love Poem?"

The Story of a Stupid Head

Shelley strode into the living room after a meeting at the school, brandishing a piece of paper.

“You’re not going to believe what happened.”

“What?” I said, expecting maybe a gossipy dust-up over some school policy. The elementary school our kids went to was private and progressive with a child-centered curriculum. Shelley was on a parent committee that had met that evening with the interim principal.

When the meeting finished, the interim principal, Chaz (not his real name), caught up to Shelley as she made her way to her car. Up to this point, he had been having a difficult time adapting to the unique culture of the school and had glommed on to Shelley as one parent still willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Chaz said, “Can we talk?” and led her toward the back of the unlit campus near some trailers that served as temporary classrooms, ostensibly to discuss the meeting but along the way also asking casual yet curious questions about me, her husband, such as “What’s Steve like?”+

As they parted ways, he said, “This is for you,” and handed her a photocopied piece of paper.

Shelley held it up for me. “I read it in the car. It’s a poem. A love poem!”

“A love poem?”

“A love poem!”

My mouth gaped and my eyes widened.

“Let me see that.”

I read the poem, brow furrowed. After a long moment, I looked up.

“…This is a love poem?”

“Did you read it?”

“Yeah, I read it.”

“It’s a love poem.”

“Really?”

“Yes! Really!”

“I don’t know,” I sighed, a bit disappointed. I had been looking forward to some righteous husband anger.

She snatched the paper from me, “What are you talking about?” smacking it with the back of her hand for emphasis, “It’s obviously a love poem!”

I shrugged. “Sorry, I was an English major. We had to read a lot of poems. Shakespeare and shit. I’m not seein’ it.”

She gritted her teeth.

“You’re stupid,” she declared, implying that the Ivy League English degree my parents had ponied up a considerable wad of 1970s cash for wasn’t worth the parchment paper it was printed on.

The smart thing for me to do would have been to say, “You know, on second thought, I see what you mean. Yeah, it’s a love poem. I read it too quickly. Definitely a love poem. I’m pissed. You want me to have “a word” with ole Chaz… behind the trailers… in the dark… if I’m not being too metaphorical?”

Whereupon Shelley would have said, “No, I can handle this myself.” To which I would have replied, “I know you can, honey. I’m here to support you.”

But I didn’t say any of that. For a very good reason.

I’m stupid.

I stuck to my guns. The guns I was pointing at my own stupid head.·

There was a lot going on here. Shelley was likely upset with me for a number of reasons.

First, she had come home to her husband after being hit on by the school principal, and I was treating it like a discussion section for a Victorian literature class.

Second, did she think I wasn’t acting jealous enough? Or worse, did she think I thought she wasn’t desirable enough to be hit on?

By this time, we were in our mid-forties, and Shelley had let me in on something she and her women friends had experienced. As soon as they hit 40, men, young and old, no longer gave them a second look. Suddenly, after four decades, everywhere they moved about, the park, the street, the grocery store, they were invisible.

It’s not that women want to be ogled or catcalled, but I guess – and I say “I guess” because what the hell do I know? – if you’ve spent the better part of forty years being ogled and cat-called, you get used to it. So when it stops, it’s an adjustment.

One of my best friends, Fred Stoller, told me that when he was a kid, bullies chased him every day at recess. One day, the bullies were absent. No one chased him down at recess. He didn’t know what to do with himself. He felt oddly alone and at loose ends until the next day when the bullies showed up and resumed chasing him. Life as he knew it made sense again.

It’s possible to miss even negative attention. If you’re a woman, you’ve spent all those years wearing armor (or loose-fitting clothing), your guard up, fending off lascivious looks, sexually suggestive remarks, unwanted advances. Then one day you realize, “Hm. I guess that’s over.”

You lay down your trusty shield, dinged and pockmarked by the slings and arrows of outrageous assholes. Goodbye, old friend. The Hunger Games have been called on account of age.

For some instinctive reason I didn’t consider this paunchy, middle-aged school principal a threat. Maybe I should have. After all, he did have a reputation. At his previous school, he had left his wife for the PE teacher.

Maybe it was the nature of the come-on. That’s the move you make when you’re fifty? You hand a woman a poem you pulled out of a printer? That’s all the game you got? Maybe that’s enough to make a PE teacher swoon, Lord Byron, but I’m supposed to be intimidated by that?

In this case, I think Shelley was more upset because I didn’t believe her. I wasn’t there. I didn’t know the context, the mood, the nuance. It wasn’t that I didn’t think she was worthy of being hit on. Shelley is beautiful, extremely attractive, both physically and as a person. And I could believe Chaz was testing the waters.

But none of that mattered.

It was the poem. I got stuck on the damn poem, the poem, that was not, in my erudite opinion, a love poem. That’s what I was hanging my hat on – with my stupid head in it.

The next day Shelley came to me, phone in hand. “I called my mom. I read her the poem. She said, ‘It’s definitely a love poem.’”

“Okay,” I nodded. I respected Shelley’s mom’s opinion. That was a solid endorsement. I could see that as a blurb on the cover of the published version. “Definitely a love poem!” Dana Powsner.

“And my sisters said so, too!”

Wow, she was conducting a full court push poll.

This time, I chose not to defend my thesis. A good night’s sleep had raised my IQ a point or two. I did, however, notice she had not asked her dad, who happened to be a man.

Although I’m not sure her dad would have had my back. He lived in a female-dominated household and knew when to keep his head down.

A few years before, we had visited Shelley’s family in New Jersey. Shelley and I had gone out for a rare dinner alone, and in the course of our casual conversation, I off-handedly observed that I couldn’t remember doing anything in my life that wasn’t ultimately aimed at impressing girls, playing sports, singing in the car, being funny, trading in glasses for contact lenses, the way I combed my hair... breathing.

Shelley didn’t believe me. She didn’t want to think that men were so shallow. The next day, she took her dad aside, told him what I had said, and asked him if he felt the same way. Henry, a doctor, a scientist, and most definitely not a stupidhead, replied to his daughter, “Of course not. I do many things for their own sake, because I enjoy doing them.”

When she reported that back to me, I shook my head, “Of course he said that. What else is he going to say to his daughter?” He knows what answer to give when his little girl rushes up to him, “Daddy, this boy said blah-blah-blah. What do you think?” No way he’s supporting the boy or his blah-blah-blah.

Eventually, the issue of whether it was a love poem or not faded away. Shelley ignored the principal’s overture, I kept the white horse in the stables, and Chaz’s term at the school ended soon enough.

For those of you who have been reading my stuff, it won’t surprise you that this wasn’t the end of the “love” poem for me. As is my wont, I tried to turn this little marital kerfuffle into a script for fun and profit.

I brought the idea into the Everybody Loves Raymond writers’ room, but we had just done an episode that referred to a love poem, so that wouldn’t work. For a long time, it didn’t quite fit into any of the subsequent shows I worked on, either, for reasons mostly having to do with my apparently unrelatable lack of jealousy. But to me, that was the funny part.

About a dozen years later my good friend, Tom Saunders, hired me to write on a show he created based on his own nuclear family. It was an American/Canadian co-production set to air in Canada called The Wonderful Wayneys (eventually renamed Raising Expectations) with Molly Ringwald (American) and Jason Priestley (Canadian) as the parents of five precocious children. Tom thought the situation would fit his characters. Finally, I had a chance to explore the topic and play out all the what ifs.

All those years later, Shelley even found the poem for me. She emailed it to me with the message, “It took me a while to find this. It was under my pillow. Kidding!” Should I have been more worried that she felt the need to add “kidding.”·

I brought the poem into the writers’ room, which was divided pretty evenly between men and women. They unanimously agreed that, though the poem’s meaning was on the subtle side, Shelley, her mom, and her sisters were right. It was a love poem. My fellow writers offered how I was probably thrown when it didn’t start “Roses are red. Violets are blue…”

Although it was my story, we farmed out the scripting to one of our excellent Canadian writers, Barb Haynes. We decided that the kids in the family would substitute for Shelley’s mom and sisters, and the kids would agree with their mother that it was a love poem. The sensitive kids are upset that their parents are fighting about this and catastrophize that it could mean divorce.

Jason Priestley, playing Wayne Wayney, soon realizes that even though he still thinks he’s right, he’s wrong to cling to his argument and should have supported his wife’s interpretation. There’s a big potluck fundraiser at the school that Molly Ringwald, playing Paige Wayney, has helped plan. That’s where Wayne will confront the Chaz character, who instead of a principal we made an English teacher named Mr. Carlton.

Before Wayne arrives, Paige casually brings up the poem to Mr Carlton. In their conversation, she figures out that despite its florid language (we didn’t use the real-life poem but referred to fragments of a poem we made up), it was not meant as a love poem. It was about the love of the nature and a metaphor for global warming. To add to the confusion, in the poem we referenced a “flowerpecker,” which could mean a bird, a bee, or… you know.

No sooner does Paige find out the truth than Wayne bursts into the potluck and marches up to Mr. Carlton to defend his wife’s honor. Of course, now Paige knows it was a misunderstanding. But Wayne is on a mission to make it up to his wife and challenges Mr. Carlton before she can stop him. He makes a scene at the potluck in front of not only his kids but the whole school and is mortified when it’s explained that “spirals of fiery beauty” doesn’t refer to his wife’s hair but to “the whole world being on fire” and “the hot Arabian nights tangle with your spirit” is about “…the desert! After the water crisis!”

After that climactic scene, there is a short coda back home that night. Wayne, as penance for the embarrassment he created at the school, had wildly overpaid for a terrible painting auctioned at the fundraiser. As he angrily hangs the painting over the bed, Paige says, “You don’t have to do that, honey.”

An irritated Wayne shakes his head — “It’s going up!” — a monument to the idea that sometimes it can be wrong to be right and right to be wrong.

Here’s the actual poem the principal gave Shelley. You tell me. Leave a comment to let me know where you land. You know, like if you gave it a quick gloss… at the end of a long day… and didn’t realize blood could be so damn talkative.

---

A Letter by Anthony Hecht


I have been wondering
What you are thinking about, and by now suppose
It is certainly not me.
But the crocus is up, and the lark, and the blundering
Blood knows what it knows.
It talks to itself all night, like a sliding moonlit sea.

Of course, it is talking of you.
At dawn, where the ocean has netted its catch of lights,
The sun plants one lithe foot
On that spill of mirrors, but the blood goes worming through
Its warm Arabian nights,
Naming your pounding name again in the dark heart-root.

Who shall, of course, be nameless.
Anyway, I should want you to know I have done my best,
As I’m sure you have, too.
Others are bound to us, the gentle and blameless
Whose names are not confessed
In the ceaseless palaver. My dearest, the clear unquaried blue

Of those depths is all but blinding.
You may remember that once you brought my boys
Two little woolly birds.
Yesterday the older one asked for you upon finding
Your thrush among his toys.
And the tides welled about me, and I could find no words.

There is not much else to tell.
One tries one’s best to continue as before,
Doing some little good.
But I would have you know that all is not well
With a man dead set to ignore
The endless repetitions of his own murmurous blood.

Yikes…

+ She never told me how she answered that question. Apparently, it wasn’t “big and mean and insanely jealous,” otherwise he wouldn’t have handed her the poem. The correct answer would have been “slightly above average size, friendly, and insanely unjealous.”

· One of Shelley’s favorite terms for me as in “Stop being a ----.”

· When I asked for a copy of the poem again for this piece, Shelley wrote, If this is not a love poem, there are no love poems and there is no love.

# My editor, Charles Grosel, who has also taught English Lit, wrote after reading the piece: Yeah, Steve, that’s a love poem. Too much “sliding” and “pounding” and “worming” to be otherwise. Damn! Why didn’t I call him?