MILTON P. EHRLICH - POEMS

 Milton P. Ehrlich, Ph.D. is an 87-year-old psychologist and a veteran of the Korean War who has published numerous poems in periodicals such as "Descant," “Ottawa Arts Review,” "Wisconsin Review," "Allegro Poetry Magazine," "Toronto Quarterly Review," "Christian Science

TAKE FIVE: SMOK’EM IF YOU GOT’EM
​

​Hearing the bark of my sergeant’s orders
was music to my rifleman’s ears
after trudging through rocky brambles
in mosquito-ridden underbrush.
 
I took a deep drag from the tips of my toes.
 
Cigarettes came with our K-rations,
helping me to become a nicotine drug addict--
a smoke with every cup of coffee, shot of scotch,
or after every sexual encounter.
 
Cigarettes and booze:  Always available at the PX
at deeply discounted prices.
 
It wasn’t until a few years later--
while working at N.Y. U. on a first large-scale study
on the correlation between smoking and cancer
that I followed the lead of the chain-smoking
director of the project, who quit smoking cold-turkey
the day the malarkey about smoking was revealed.
 

​MY RIVER NEVER RUNS DRY
 

I’m never alone--
your reservoir will never run dry.
I skirt bloodsuckers and stings of bumble bees--
listen to nightingales and applaud butterflies.
 
I tell my story to every starfish and anemone
that will listen and scrutinize corals
of every color, shade, and hue.
I dive into the bottom of the river
to get a glimpse of the epilogue at the end.
 
It is full of surprises.
 
Gone is yesterday’s scorpion with hairy legs.
Fish smile back at me pleased with the bugs
they have found to eat. I sleep, a sated babe
on a stone washed clean of my sins.
 
Baptized in the river,
I make the sign of the cross
in case there is a God--
 
I wear a yarmalka
to cover my bald spot,
and a Foy-Mall on my wrist
because we’re meditators
who sit back to back as one
in a love that never ends.

​

MY AGNOSTIC DOG TAG
​

​Hangs on a lamp on my desk,
revealing my serial number,
blood type, and religion.
 
I have the letter “Y” since
I’m not a “P’ (protestant),
“C” (catholic) or “H” (Hebrew).
 
When the artillery shell
burst in front of me,
I saw stars I’d never seen before.
 
They blocked the view of a holograph
of my head lying in a bombed-out crater.
 
I can still hear the Quartermaster
Graves Registration guys spreading
love everywhere as they round up
the dead bodies around me.
 
My teeth hurt clamped down in lockjaw
on my dog tag. I’m heaved into a truck
more dead than alive.
 
The men had to consult our chaplain
to find out how to bury me.
 
The Chaplain laughed--
advising them to post a question mark
where a Cross or Star of David
would normally appear.
 
I make the sign of the cross
even though I’m and agnostic.
 

NOT EVERYTHING THAT CAN BE COUNTED, COUNTS.
​

​ 
Buried under an avalanche of money
he counts every night— he wonders why
the rays of light glinting off his pile of gold
still leave him sitting alone in the dark.
 
Money, the only meaning in his solitary life
never brought him one day of happiness.
He’s never touched or been touched
by another human being.
 
The only time he felt loved--
was being bathed by mother as a young toddler.
She shampooed his hair and fondled his genitals
to stop him from crying when soap got in his eyes.
 
He now pleasures himself in a nightly bath
in a window to a vividly remembered past--
thinking of his mother’s pendulous breasts
and her intoxicating scent while he bathes
in the soapy skins of dollar bills slathered
in cobalt blue bottles of Evening In Paris.
 
He deposits the ghosts of his unborn progeny
all over the sudsy waters of his dollar bills.
 
He weeps.  
 

FATHER
​

​Father loved me like a mother,
but when his world fell apart,
our house shook with lightening–like scars,
 
yet he soldiered on with a shot of schnapps
in the morning as he stood at attention
and sang in a loud, fiercely proud voice:
 
Allons, enfants de la patrie le jour de gloire est arrive.
 
He taught me to swim on his back.
 
On summer mornings, we swam
from the Coney Island pier to the end
of Brighton Beach, pursuing the horizon
like a 6-masted sloop cutting through
rotund Russian ladies and around
slim surfers sliding up and down
the wind-swept waves of the sea.
 
The sounds of Coney were never far from my ears--
the bass drum beat of the singing mermaids
in the Mermaid Parade,
and the unbridled joy of calliope music
that brings tears to my eyes
whenever I’m near a moving carousel.
 
Swimming into homeport,
I still hear Father’s orders:
Land Ho— All hands on deck—
drain the scuppers
and make ready to abandon ship!