What Was It About Him
Margot Wizansky
About the Author:
Margot Wizansky has written and revised with the Poemworks community for more than 28 years. Her poems have appeared in many journals. She edited several anthologies and was awarded residencies with Writers@Work in Salt Lake City and with Carlow University in Ireland at the Isle of Innisfree. Her chapbook,
Wild for Life, a chronicle in poems of her near-death and coma was published with Lily Poetry Review Books (2022). The Yellow Sweater was published by Kelsay Press in 2023 and Random Music in a Small Galaxy in 2025.
Cover by Adam Wilson @fourcolorblack on IG
WHAT WAS IT ABOUT HIM?
When we were about to become, before he
nestled into my quiet, before our little world
turned hurtful and righted itself, it wasn’t his baldness,
way too young, or the comb-over that never stayed put,
or the acid-blue jacket that made his face look whiskered
when he was clean-shaven, or the owlish black-rimmed glasses.
It was the eyes behind the glasses, night-beckoning,
rimmed in green and umber tints of forest.
I could fall into the gentleness of his eyes, and the way
he sat before me in the grad student lounge, leaning back a little,
chest wide-open, arms uncrossed and welcoming,
ready to wrap around me, his conversation artless,
friendly and reticent at the same time, not personal,
not seductive, just ordinary chat—school, professors.
When in class he read the homage he wrote to his
Boston neighborhood, its closeness, its diversity,
that terrible casualty of re-development,
I had the urge to take him home.
And his wanting me was filled with so much guilt
for the other woman he first had to leave to be with me.
The honorable thing to do, he said,
and kept me for months his guilty secret.