Two Kinds of Love Songs

TWO KINDS OF LOVE SONGS

There are two kinds
of love songs:
“You’re marvelous”
and “I’m heartbroken.”
We live in the era
of the premature memoir
but I refuse to confess
or complain and when
you call I start singing
“Too Marvelous for Words”
instead of saying hello.
I’m not out of control.
I just flirt with everybody
because I love her.
The three of us
made a very disarming pair.

– David Lehman, “February 8” from The Daily Mirror: A Journal in Poetry (2000)

Composer Richard Wilson, who decided to pair New York City’s Century Club poets and composers by drawing the names of the poets out of a hat, wrote me that there was still one name left at the bottom of the hat, and put in the subject of his e-mail “Please Don’t Kill Me!” (I had told him weeks earlier that I had no interest in writing a song to the words of a poet I didn’t choose—the poetry nor the poet.) But all of a sudden in my In box was David Lehman’s “It Could Happen to You” that had just appeared in the December 4, 2017 The New Yorker. I fell in love. After perusing his work I found “February 8” from The Daily Mirror: A Journal in Poetry (2000). A wildly lively correspondence ensued, and we finally met for the first time at the Century on February 8, 2018. This song is dedicated to Russell Merritt, whose birthday just happens to be . . . February 8.