There is nothing to be done
when you’ve pissed your wife off

so purely a crazed look comes to her eyes
and she holds a butcher knife

blade up over the onion shoots,
or is there?

It’s you, not her.
It’s you.

Even if you are entirely convinced
it’s her, it’s you.  Face it.

Face your foolish male-born pride
that thrives

like a white European plague
rising from the sledge

of the Germanic half-Czech dark ages
to infect the world. 

Call it rude, self-absorbed,
dominant, unwilling,

narcissistic, bereft
of anything

life-giving.  Okay? Your agenda
at her expense, drop it.  

A forty-four year old man approached me.
I was a boy, seventeen,

and just done eating dinner at his table.
Will you forgive me? he asked,

he said he was wrong to his wife
just there, and already I had forgotten

his sharp words to her
only ten minutes previous.

I was on the couch now,
my eyes glazed with television,

removed, I looked up,
Yes, I stammered.  You don’t have to ask me.  

His wife beside him,
his daughter in the distance

the one
I would marry.