The Sinking

You are
now only
an equation.  You are
the weight of your body
exaggerated,
the weight of your dress,
wet. You are the salinity
of the water
confronting the temperature
of the air.  You are
the temperature itself
(not the word
for it, not
the idea, but)
the actual feel
of vapor given
a set
of conditions.

You are
heavy...

Your heart like lead,
dead in the cavity,
is sinking.  The black
ink of the ocean
enveloping you.
Time standing still,
at attention,
at the edge of the world.
11:55

This is
a broken clock
a silenced organ,
still standing
a steeple of crumbling stone:
after the war
the watch's face
wrinkled in doubt
begins to sag.
Dali begins
to dream.

One wave
will reduce you
to the rubble you leave
behind.  One wave,
your fingers are blue roses
that may bloom
a final time
as you slip beneath the surface.
One wave
one breath
one last tattered tongue
wagging.

Words,
unheard,
unspoken
are broken
(like ancient pottery)
on the ocean

floor.

Wedding

Given to discipline both in the organization of her time and of her ideas, the well-bred bride smiles (politely) and waves with pride disguised.  Humility is wound to wild vibration by the adulation of the crowd.  She cannot contain it, even if she knows them to be willfully misinformed.  Their perception reflected back to her obscures for her the shortcomings that eat at her confidence.  Draped in lace and taffeta, she was today, perhaps for the first time, breathing in her own power.  Would there ever be another day in her whole dreamed, anticipated and uncertain future when she would feel this important again?  This beautiful?  Listened to?  Loved? 

Her father, a retiring alcoholic, had settled into a chair of an abandoned table on the edge of the lawn.  Her mother, divorced from that man (and another) and now married to a silver fox who you could easily read as gay, sits with her husband at a crowded table where--if the conversation lapses at all--she interjects trivial facts into the air the way some people hum.  And from her perch, the beauty queen can see both of her parents as well as the three of five siblings that actually elected to attend.  Unheard of.  She looks at them all without feeling any longer connected to them.  The champagne's digressions, the bride begins to fantasize about a future in which she can begin the forget those ties.                                                          

     

"In these crimes you might find a five year reprieve."  Putting off the inevitable.  "Their domicile was here in northeast,"  the best man, her new husband's brother, keeps talking.  And because her attention is divided between her own private thoughts and his prattling, his line of reasoning is quickly becoming impressionistic and meaningless.  "These philosophies and theologies have persisted in Providence, face them now to face them down.  Better now than later."  She is stymied.  He speaks a few lines in French, unexplained.  She thinks, "This is an odd way that the intellectual boob maintains his ringing arrogance." It sounds genuine to him.  

The bride reviews her motivations, the wisdom of this marriage.  She feels insulated from so many decisions she had made.  Except the big ones.  Big one.  Where is the groom?  Why hasn't her new husband intervened, saved her from his brother's suffocating attentions.  Looking around she sees a half dozen men that arrest her gaze.  The waiter, boiling with a nonspecific exoticism.  A friend of her husband from college had seemed interesting when they were introduced earlier.  Even the young minister with his perfect teeth, shining eyes, has entered her imagination.  What will she do without her aching wants?  She is over it, wishing for something different.  There is less boredom at an age of limitless desire, but there is hope.

B Day

These days, these weeks, these pages of the calendar are but a deck of cards care--ful/less--ly shuffled. Faceless, ageless and uncertain, they align with the clicking of a gear. This is the accident out of which I will court meaning, out of which I will invent a life...out of thin air. In the end, the narrative will be the measure of all this, the craft of the conversation. Listen to how it punctuates the pauses between the mints and nuts, between the hands, fanned-wide and bejeweled.