October 2017
Robert Wexelblatt
wexelblatt@verizon.net
I live near Boston and teach at Boston University.  Besides academic pieces, I write fiction when I’m up to it and poems when I can’t help it.  I use a fountain pen—my link to tradition—and usually write to music.  I’ve published essays, stories, and poems in a wide variety of journals.  My most recent book is Petites Suites. 

Going to Bed with Jane Austen
 

I imagine her fluttering as I clamber in
like a dove disturbed in her cote, cranky
but interested, black agate eyes missing nothing
of the comedy of pose, of sheet, of weight.
Then, propped on one elbow I’d declare, “This is
what happens after all the novels are over,
Jane--what you, knowing everything in
miniature, didn't ever know . . .”  But then
I’m sure she'd laugh--and what a laugh!
My pompousness explodes like a wineglass
spilling amour-propre all over the queen-sized bed.
I am discomfited, delighted; I am
ashamed, amused; while she, she is at her ease.
 
Rational conversation and sublime gossip
fill the remainder of our night until,
like that famous sultan, I finally fall
asleep, putting matters off yet another day.
 
 



Hair Haiku
 

Any darker and
I would not have seen the one
hair on my pillow.
 
Dusk dropped.  I plucked the
brown hair from the blue linen.
Quickly, the sun set.
 
Graceful as the stroke
of Ryōkan’s brush, your hair
curled against my palm.
 
Absence and presence,
two mysteries clasped tight in
one hand.  Empty rooms.   
                      “Going to Bed with Jane Austen” first appeared in The Literary Review
                                “Hair Haiku” first appeared in The Cape Rock
       © 2017 Robert Wexelblatt​
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