MILTON P. EHRLICH PH.D. - POEMS

Milton P. Ehrlich Ph.D. is an 87 year old psychologist and a veteran of the Korean War. He has published many poems in periodicals such as the London Grip, Arc Poetry Magazine, Descant Literary Magazine, Wisconsin Review, Taj Mahal Literary journal, Antigonish Review, Ottowa Arts Review, Red Wheelbarrow, Huffington Post, Christian Science Monitor, and the New York Times.

HER DRESS IS PREPARED
​

​Who is that knock, knock, knocking at my burglar-proof door?
I must call the ADT— but I forgot the passwor
It might be Doc who warned me about too many empty beer bottles
floating around in the sea of my liver.
 
Doc also worries about why ice cream cones planted on my diabetes mellitus.
has the deepest roots he’s ever seen.
 
But now I remember— he doesn’t make house calls anymore.
 
My wife asks how she looks in her new black dress
with the string of ivory pearls I gave her for our fiftieth anniversary.
She always wants to look her best when we go dancing.
 
But she’s reluctant to explain why she’s so concerned about her outfit--
maybe she wants to look perfect for something else?
 
She says it’s for a special occasion coming up at the church pretty soon. 

MY FATHER’S FATHER HAD SYPHILIS
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​He was a peddler in a horse-drawn wagon that sank beneath a load of watermelons,
canary-yellow corn, bushels of gladiolas and mountains of ruby-red grapes.
 
He sang Yiddish tunes up and down the ethereal sheen of blueness on the Danube.
His smiling face endeared himself to the ladies from Bucharest to Constantinople.
 
He sold silk stockings, corsets and perfume to female customers,
and clarinets, castanets and tambourines to the musically inclined.
 
An ebullient salesman he lived in a state of astonishment and awe.
His life was a poem.
He side-stepped pogroms and massacres,
and never knew a melancholy hour.
 
He was on fire.
He reached for each moment— the only way he could put out the fire,
until a venomous spirochete lodged in his spine,
working its way to his brain as he took his last breath.
 
Scars of love were written on his soul.
His body had vibrated with a passion that kept the skin of the cosmos alive with light.
 

ON ALL THOSE SATURDAY AFTERNOONS
​

I fell in love with a married woman,
who smiled, because she knew.
 
I waited all week chomping at the bit
to meet with her in our romantic tryst
in my friend’s posh eastside apartment.
 
She snuck away from neighborhood eyes
to jump in my car blocks away from home.
 
Entwined in a musk of libidinal acrobatics
often resulted in a burst of tears.
The unendurable impasse lingered
for the longest 5 years of my life.
 
We survived on stolen time.
When I rubbed her feet, her body heaved
like a warm water tide coming in.
 
We grew gray, wobbly on our feet,
but clung to each other for 70 years,
in an underground fire that still burns.
 

COLD SHINE OF SUN ON SWAMP WATER
​

​As a young clinical psychologist
recruited to provide psychotherapy
to a resident in a nursing home,
 
I found an unsmiling old man in bed
with ice cold hands even though
morning sun shone over bed and body.
 
At his bedside was a small aquarium
sent by his only son in South Africa.
It had 2 seahorses struggling to survive
in murky, algae-infested green salt waters. 
 
His sex hung unbidden in sagging diapers.
The light had gone out of bloodshot eyes;
nails were untrimmed and a forest of hair
had sprouted in his ears and nose.
 
Clouds of spittle flowed my way as he mumbled
that since his wife died, life was nothing but a carbuncle
on his big toe, and he just waited to die as soon as  he could.
 
Refusing to try anti-depressant medications,
and reluctant to tell me anything about his life,
except that he once was a lightweight boxer.
 
They can ring the bell all they want,
but I’m not getting up to go another round.
Leave me alone and get out of here!