When you get to be my age 
you don’t need to sleep,
my mother would tell me. 
She knew a lot about baking and human nature
and especially about sleep, 
which she never got enough of— 
working and dreaming and riding the subway home
and making dinner when she arrived. 

After, she’d fall asleep on the sofa
and get up in time for the 11 o’clock news,
taking special note of the weather 
though she would never do anything about it--
I had high expectations for her. 
Then she’d make her famous blueberry buckle 
and clean up best she could, 
or comb through Good Housekeeping
though keeping house was not a specialty
she especially enjoyed.

I once saw her nap on the bed 
right when she was in the midst of making it. 
Should I wake her?
I didn’t know what to do
so I let her sleep
and went out to play
and didn’t bother telling her where I’d gone. 

Years later, she denied this ever happened--
but by then I knew enough to tell her
that much like this poem,  
I mostly made it up.
                        

Used in accordance with Fair Use Act

Make a friend that doesn’t look like you, 
reads Abdul-Jabbar’s t-shirt on the nightly news.  
And he’s the very one I want.  
Seven foot two, give or take an inch,  
thin as a yardstick, lithe as a deer.  
Where do I go to find another
so calm and wise, with skin so taut 
not a wrinkle finds space 
on that aging visage?  

I saw him in high school
beauty itself, the flashbulbs 
blinding, but he, oblivious,
a man with a job to do and no one 
to be with-- no team, no coach, no friends 
who could reach so high, 
only us, agape, chanting, Lew, Lew, Lew
as if he could hear us through the din. 
Though we knew, even then, 
we would never really know him, 
he showed us again, and again, and again.