Never So Intensely

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

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.