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Epithalamium
Baby girl because you liked it when I called you that and I liked it when I called you that, I just listened to that country song you wrote about me again. For poetry. Because this aisle walk is easier than when we walked down the street in Laramie holding hands. When I was struck by my vulnerability, your existence, our accident, that first night when Joy Williams called to warn me about something else. Something we’d all want to dismiss but be unable to. Like our love. Our limitations. It wasn’t only wine spilled all over the floor. There are so many trucks on those wide roads. And they know where the rope is, where the fence is, how to build a fire. Fine, we’ll get married. It’s the kind of L you want to be. And I think of myself as generous. As someone who will promise. So we will both throw flowers. I will wear a suit and a dress and half wish I look anything like Frida because she wears all this mythology better. I went to one of those weddings. There were pastries on sticks, and flan, and dulces. And you are so white. The kind of white woman who reminds me I’m not a white woman. But I said I could be generous because that’s what love is. That marriage lasted only a few weeks. I know because my apartment was part of the escape route. Like I was yours. But we lasted ten months. You even, cliché, moved in. Brought all of your electronics. Brought me home for dinner at the cattle ranch on the other side of the mountains where your mother didn’t like me. I wasn’t what she wanted for you, for herself, for a daughter, but you still wanted. You were still so proud. And I fucked you better in her house for it. And we gave each other rings, and hey, I never liked that song. But I find myself listening again. Because once, I was at a wedding in Providence, and it was so gay, it was beautiful, and it got them a kid and through the next year. |
