A rather weighty proposition, asked to read at our daugther's wedding. Something old, something new? I found plenty of inspirational readings, but felt like, with some pressure, could devise my own. I set out to incorporate "love,"God", and "New Orleans", without just using the phrase, "Oh, God, I love New Orleans."
It seemed only a question
of a few years before the older people would step aside and let the world be
run by those who saw things as they were, and it all seems rosy and romantic to
us who were young then, because we will never feel quite so intensely about our
surroundings any more. – F. Scott Fitzgerald, Echoes of the Jazz Age, posted on Cheryl Manley's tumblr site.
Within a marriage
each partner will never feel
so intensely about their
surrounds,
as when strangers to the new.
For what is novel -
reinvented rhythms,
secrecies to solve -
binds them together,
discovering, as they plunge,
with curiosity, perplexity,
and love.
They are falling in – to their city,
and one another to form
a crossing, connection, compromise.
Look at the bend in the
Mississippi,
how the river reserves its
stores,
‘til at that juncture
where the water arcs,
shoots ships from its channel
before currents commit
before currents commit
and yield to sea.
So it is, two partners bear
in to each other -
raise
their own roof,
to
crown their confines.
lean
in as live oaks,
yet
reach like new leaves,
craft
the keystone
to
carry their quarrels and joy.
Let that marriage be like St
Louis Cathedral,
her vaulted arches across the
façade
open to the strains of Have Mercy,
or Te Deum, To Thee O God.
Her many bowed windows,
like open eyes,
dance madly upon the square.
Let marriage be the art
of crescent-like cast iron
bending over balconies,
curved entrées into covert courtyards,
Let each Victorian portico admired
become a paean to the arch, to
marriage
a reminder to fall -
in to each other, in to fervor.
Fall in,
then fall in again.
@Copyright Three Arch Press, 2014.
@Copyright Three Arch Press, 2014.
