After Thirty Years of Marriage, One Adjusts
Her snoring could wake the dead
or, at the least, keep me wide awake
well past my demise. The bed
as if within the grip of a quake,
an easy six on Richter’s scale, would seem
in danger of collapse; the walls shake,
the pictures on their hooks, are they safe?
Above, the roof itself, the ceiling beams,
the foundations, reduced to a cloud
of dust, and maybe I then could get some sleep;
these are my thoughts as I lie awake so deep
in the night; yet no matter how loud
she snores, her snoring’s still to be preferred—
as I try to turn her onto her side
while she sleeps, although she’s not quite as light,
my arms not quite as strong as they once were—
preferred, I say, to waking in the dead
of night, to silence, nothing to be heard,
no breath, a sheet spread flat as turf, a dread
that makes these seismic jolts of rolling thunder,
that tear my tranquil, dream-filled nights asunder,
so sweet against the quiet of the void, the hush
that truly would reduce everything else to dust.
J. Weintraub has published fiction, essays, translations, and poetry in all sorts of literary reviews and periodicals, from The Massachusetts Review to New Criterion, from Prairie Schooner to Midwestern Gothic. Many of his pieces have been anthologized, and he has received awards for fiction and creative nonfiction from, among others, the Illinois Arts Council, the Barrington Arts Council, and Holy Names University. He is currently a member of the Dramatists Guild, and he has had radio plays, staged readings, and one-act plays produced throughout the USA and in Australia, New Zealand, and India. More at http:/jweintraub.weebly.com