[Golias]

The Wedding and the Cape


The Wedding

Although, as may become the day,
your wedding gown and veil are white,
the tune you bid the harpist play,
My Lady Greensleeves, seems the right
music for a wedding dance:
Honi soit qui mal y pensé.


The melody, contrary to the words,
entwines our hearts with gold and silver chords,
that tenderly our willing minds enfold,
and like the phrases, reverenced and old,
the cleric reads from The Book of Common Prayer,
give benediction to the wedded pair.

Jenny Riley’s family has lent
their spacious home for our reception site.
The wedding cake is cut; an hour spent
in thanking friends and kinfolk who are there.
You change in Jenny's room and down the stair
come like the evening star in bright descent.

Goodbyes, kisses, tears, and we are gone.
Your cousin Allen drives us into town
and leaves us at the Muehlebach on our own.
The room to which our luggage has been sent
has flowers and champagne. The management
by policy and for pay has graced the room
with all that might befit a bride and groom.

All our lives we will recall this night.
Eighteen months like priest and nun we waited
for phases of our lives to finish right.
Now those delays are done, concerns abated,
and we are free, together, safely calm
and ready. Sips of nine year old clouet,
a little rest; pajamas and the palm
of gossamer night dresses fall away.


The Cape

Of the first day after any couple marries
what should each of them recall the clearest?
Which memory will resurrect the whole?
For we two is it not this flight that carries
the two of us to Boston as the nearest
stepping stone to Provincetown, our goal?
On this, your maiden flight, you are allowed
the window seat to see the outside show:
high-piled cumulus and sweeps of stratus cloud,
or two thousand miles of roads that creep below.

Our Boston hotel, plain red brick affair,
no Muehlebach, but the room is clean; the bed
soft and welcoming. We tumble there.
This second night we sleep, unlike the dead,
in dreams we share in the morning riding down
by train to Barnstable, far as trains can run,
where we board a a jolly bus to Provincetown;
the famous inn, our room, and journey done.

Nightfall, moonless, starless darkness finds
us where the Pilgrims first set foot on land.
We cannot see but hear the rushing winds
and ocean waves along the rocky strand.
You never heard that sound before, you say.
Sill listening, we walk back to the inn,
as if the winds could tell what lies beyond today;
new lives, new expectations, shortly to begin.

Next morning in the town we wander through
you buy a pad and a box of charcoal sticks.
You sketch me nude, and though I am far too
unskilled to sketch, my fascination clicks
the living cameras of my eyes to keep,
lifelong, your images in every stage
of dress and undress, movement, rest, and sleep,
all from these days of love’s first golden age


Without a car or bicycles we hike
the road to Race Point’s broad and sandy beach.
The sea’s too cold for swimming but you like
the eastward stretch of it and try to reach
your hand as far as France “just over there.”
“Actually, that’s Spain” I literalize.
The lighthouse towers above us, mewling cries
of gulls befriend us, and the sky is fair.

Days pass. We think we’ve time and youth to spare,
but the calendar is jealous. By surprise
the Saturday we take our leave arrives
and calls us back---to face our future lives.