My Birthday

I do love Linda Pastan’s work. So it feels appropriate that The Writer’s Almanac has one of her poems today - as though just for me, for my birthday.

I Married You 

I married you
for all the wrong reasons,
charmed by your
dangerous family history,
by the innocent muscles, bulging
like hidden weapons
under your shirt,
by your naive ties, the colors
of painted scraps of sunset.

I was charmed too 
by your assumptions
about me: my serenity —
that mirror waiting to be cracked,
my flashy acrobatics with knives
in the kitchen.
How wrong we both were
about each other,
and how happy we have been.
LINDA PASTAN