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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Linda Pastan
Linda Pastan
Linda Pastan was born to a Jewish family in the Bronx in 1932. She is the author of more than a dozen collections of poetry, including Queen of a Rainy Country...
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FURTHER READING
Poems About Anniversaries
Couple Sharing a Peach
by Molly Peacock
Earth Tremors Felt in Missouri
by Mona Van Duyn
Francesco and Clare
by David St. John
Man and Wife
by Robert Lowell
My Wife
by Robert Louis Stevenson
Orpheus
by Robert Kelly
The Anniversary
by John Donne
The Elephant is Slow to Mate
by D.H. Lawrence
The Storm
by Theodore Roethke
To My Dear and Loving Husband
by Anne Bradstreet
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I Married You  
by Linda Pastan

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.



"I Married You", from Queen of a Rainy Country by Linda Pastan. Copyright © 2006 by Linda Pastan. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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