She once gave me a raft of hand-me down clothes.
Of good quality, and competent craftsmanship
But off somehow
I tried to alter them
To make them
Something a young woman could find comfort in
But this has never been a story about
Young women finding comfort
From what is cast off and
given away
I might as well be a canine companion
In this ritual of carefulness
Wash the shoes, spray them with bleach, stuff the scrubs into the drum of the machine, always use extra detergent
Spin out
Then dry on the line
Everything sanitized
In this intense, summer light
You say the sweetest things
A soft answer turns away wrath
Love is always patient
What if you took the terrible letters of a curse of sorts
One you never willed and controlled and made it into an acrostic or a cypher-
The letters are a-b-I-r-r-t-u-w
What if that were a word by itself
And you-like the fairy godmother you resemble in rounded form only
No power only soft and aging
No longer the princess or the sleeper or the magic one
Just this one last spell-
Let the word when spoken
Set us free from past and illusion
Let it be the strange, scary truth of the thing-
Oh fragile love-
You say the sweetest things
First of all, let me reiterate that I do not expect you two to go the distance–not that prophetic considering where you are today and the inauspicious nature of this ceremony of disaster.
Most weddings are full of shi…..ps, little paper boats people fold along seams, scribble on, and push out onto whatever river they believe in. They write platitudes for the pain, use costly words all wrong.
Then the little boats float off
Leaving you there at the altar, no more substantial than cake topper avatars
Not ready for this:
Loves fierce resolve
To begin and end/end and begin
Together.
I see the man making models of planets in his meticulous, scienc-y basement then lining them up like a photographer arranging and rearranging a family portrait,
Mercury, you stand here…Jupiter if you could squeeze in by the ping-pong table
Or the final run and podium judgment of the Westminster Dog Show
It is a neat trick
Of human folly to think we can order the objects floating in an infinite sky, make them feel smaller than they are, more manageable
When even the moon is beyond us
Its insistent pull and reflective splendor
Missed so often in the ordinary
Night sky
As we pack all the objects of this solar system
Between us
Furniture against the door of Love
I want rudimentary shelving in the wild backyard for the Walmart canoes
I want an art table
And an extra large button-down shirt with flecks of paint already on it
I want a shelter for the sun and shelter for the darkness
I want the trees to grow up around us, ramparts
And the tiny praying mantis to have a disproportionate number of siblings
Rain, so the river can rise above the exposed and naked roots of the
Already. Dying.
On the eve of something from long ago I walk out into a beautiful storm, the trees bend leaves and branches–freshly laundered linens, a veil, a dress, a comforter to keep us
to words once and always
eternal
Darling, it should
Come as no surprise to you
I have rescued each of these from something
So shall we name them–downfall, downfall, downfall, downfall, downfall, downfall
or indelible redemption
Your love
is like
the mints I fish from the bottom of
my purse
You tell yourself it is just food, knowing you want
To keep it for another time
when you could rejoice
For a year, for the first year after, for as long as it takes
like the frozen wedding cake
As though love could last forever
The way he says it does
Manna in our wilderness
Elealee's Blog 