Two Poems

by Emily Strauss

Being Old Like You   
            for Greta

When I am 76 I want to wear earrings in my garden with dangling pearls,
change from my breakfast skirt to shorts and back again, my blouse crisp
with embroidery, in sandals and anklets with frilly edges.

I will lay crocheted blankets across every chair, cut up old sheets for rags,
bring out my 85-year-old tablecloth with hand-rolled napkins for company,
sip from great-grandmother's crystal goblets.

I will bring in my own firewood too, burn oil lamps, heat my wash water
on the stove, bathe in a dishpan, hang my clothes on pine branches,
grow my own melons, harvest pumpkins and persimmons,

put up chutney, bake bread, write letters by hand, walk through muddy fields
wearing a baggy coat and boots. I will care for myself—
beat the rugs, sweep the floors, gather spiders' webs, spread gravel

for a winter path through the yard, trim the bushes, dig under old flowers,
close the door firmly against the cold night, wrap myself in frayed blankets
next to the stove with herbal tea, stare at all my pictures, listen to the wind

and rain, fingering antique memories and souvenirs, wait for light to return,
a new dawn ebbing in.

The final year you retreated to your heated recliner, wrote in your journal,
the pencil still inserted in the book the night they found you, you left before
I could come to say farewell.


The New Eye Doctor is 6’ 6”

Look right into my eyes, he says
from behind his machine, fiddling
with the dials and knobs, those eyes
so pure blue they hurt
I have a theory, he says, about why
tall men marry short women.
He told me he played basketball
in college before he got interested
in medicine but that turned out to be
too difficult, you see, to us everything
is tall so we need someone petite
to remind us of another world

which is better than the dentist who asks,
as my mouth is full of tubes and suction,
now don’t I remember that you teach,
and I’m not sure if a simple nod will
answer the intricacies of that question

And I say, that’s interesting because short
men have always liked my height and I never
understood why they wanted to look up,
and grab my ample ass, I didn’t add

Keep looking straight into my eyes, he says
still turning dials, fine-tuning he calls it,
and they are still blue against a butch
haircut, you should have seen it before,
he says, this is pretty severe, and I continue
to stare into those pools thinking, at least
I’m not drooling, with no equipment to catch
me, just these alien goggles he’s hiding
behind as he perfects my eyesight before
I don’t have to stare straight into his eyes
anymore, and I am disappointed at the loss.