Another poem for my sweetheart...
Clear-eyed girl you were, deemed “too
tall”—talking to the old anthropologist
(later—unhinged—“she’s beautiful”
he’d creak) that summer afternoon,
radiant, your yellow ribbon
windblown—his shillelagh tapped
across the dappled granite pavers.
Astride a cascade of longing
and tethered in trust we’d danced
together nights before, anchored
in love. But that day (just perhaps)
some prescient windward flow
of breeze and heaven kept
blowing us together and (unrelenting
as love) enlivened us that day, now.
Later that year we’d marry, then hop
into the Coronet (you still in your wedding
dress) to tell our love to him bedside
as he lay dying. In sickness and health,
through sweet and sour, a girl’s clear-eyed
constancy still persists and nourishes: the love
we’ve shared—once fumbling at words, waistbands
wedding prayers—rises tall, thriving with mercy.
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