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She was in terrible pain the whole day, as she had been for months: a slipped disc, and there is nothing more painful. She herself was a nurse’s aide, also a poet just beginning to make a name for her nom de plume. As with most things in life, it happened when she was changing channels on her television. The lucky man, on the other hand, was smiling for the first time in his life, and it was fake. He was an aspiring philosopher of dubious potential, very serious, but somehow lacking in essential depth. He could have been an adequate undertaker. It was not the first time for either of them. It was a civil service, with no music, few flowers. Still, there was a slow and erratic tide of champagne—corks shot clear into the trees. And flashcubes, instant photos, some blurred and some too revealing, cake slices that aren’t what they were meant to be. The bride slept through much of it, and never did we figure out who was on whose team. I think the groom meant it in the end when he said, “We never thought anyone would come.” We were not the first to arrive, nor the last to leave. Who knows, it may all turn out for the best. And who really cares about such special days, they are not what we live for.

That Halloween I wore your wedding dress, our children spooked & wouldn’t speak for days. I’d razored taut calves smooth, teased each blown tress, then—lipsticked, mascaraed, & self-amazed— shimmied like a starlet on the dance floor. I’d never felt so sensual before— Catholic schoolgirl & neighborhood whore. In bed, dolled up, undone, we fantasized: we clutched & fused, torn twins who’d been denied. You were my shy groom. Love, I was your bride.

Thou God, whose high, eternal Love Is the only blue sky of our life, Clear all the Heaven that bends above The life-road of this man and wife. May these two lives be but one note In the world’s strange-sounding harmony, Whose sacred music e’er shall float Through every discord up to Thee. As when from separate stars two beams Unite to form one tender ray: As when two sweet but shadowy dreams Explain each other in the day: So may these two dear hearts one light Emit, and each interpret each. Let an angel come and dwell tonight In this dear double-heart, and teach.

• Well look, the wedding guests are here again. Why not just send a card? Snapshot. Snapshot. Smile and kiss. But this bride has such a red face! Let her scramble past pardon en route to the loo. Evacuate the taffeta dire and paunchy. The groom is erect. The groom downed three pints and stole from the caterer. He would never be no grown-up, This part we'll remember. Dull and easy. Before the spawning and apathy. Before the dementia nurse and waiting for mama to die. Silverware. Cloth napkins. Carafes. Gather round. Sit pious and clench yourself. What's within should be held in. Choke it down. Medicine for the long haul. No more wildness is why I chose no more wildness. Now scurry ho, before someone else goes down on the bride. Isn't that her in the distance, up the pole? • By pineapple, by pamplemousse, we find ourselves back at the table armed with forks and particular ideas about what to drink. Go on, order what you want. Turn up the music, you. Lucinda, you have a great voice. You have a lovelygone face and teeth. O gums! Pink and alkaline. We live in the city with crowds of fallen. Soon I am dead and soon you. We'll all be dead together! Anne said. • Marie, you are not unclean. You are rose-oiled and shiny and ensconced in the corner with the witty anesthesiologist, inhaling ladysmoke at the café. It's a pleasure just to watch you scratch the crud off your lotto ticket tonight. Then in comes Jackson, looking like he's left his wife. And again Larry is extending his feelers toward Clarice. Larry, what gives? You'll soon lose interest. Eh, Mr Candlelight? I want to give you a good close reading. Come this way. • Oh skin! What a cloth to live in. We are not at the end of things. He's tuxedoed and I'm in a cocktail dress. How gussied up we get. Drink this, roll that. Another sender different gender. We're going to hit a winner. We're going to swallow vodka and slap down money and stand around frocked and gossiping and bleed a little in the bathroom from earlier today when we were a little minx. (He really is of the masses, mama said.) • Ladies and gentlemen, introducing Mr and Mrs of the moment now and dancing. Mr and Mrs End of Suffering. Mr and Mrs Safe and Headed Where. In the reach of night she'll have him. He'll have. A series of days filled up and emptied. A welcome closeness and a womb. He pours her a fizzy one. She pours him hers. Let's keep on doing this, let's do it together. A bit of drunk and full of wishing. (Two people jumping out of a building and holding hands, R said.)

We need a preacher who’ll say up in here instead of herein. Our vows should reference calla lilies and the snowy pistils they jab ardently at our faces. Let’s place their linty, foul-mouthed kiss at the center of satin table cloths white as bee boxes and us buzzing like the ichthyic insects we’ll invent: “coddle- fish” finning the air, murmuring for words beyond civil and ceremony, beyond moderation, all our senses under assault.

for Keith and Jen Friends I am here to modestly report seeing in an orchard in my town a goldfinch kissing a sunflower again and again dangling upside down by its tiny claws steadying itself by snapping open like an old-timey fan its wings again and again, until, swooning, it tumbled off and swooped back to the very same perch, where the sunflower curled its giant swirling of seeds around the bird and leaned back to admire the soft wind nudging the bird's plumage, and friends I could see the points on the flower's stately crown soften and curl inward as it almost indiscernibly lifted the food of its body to the bird's nuzzling mouth whose fervor I could hear from oh 20 or 30 feet away and see from the tiny hulls that sailed from their good racket, which good racket, I have to say was making me blush, and rock up on my tippy-toes, and just barely purse my lips with what I realize now was being, simply, glad, which such love, if we let it, makes us feel.

Yesterday afternoon, I hung a framed print in the living room— a task that took two head-throbbing hours. It’s a wedding portrait that we love:Frida and Diego Rivera. I wonder how two people could consistently hurt each other, but still feel love so deeply as their bones turned into dust? Before Frida died, she painted a watermelon still life; before his death, Diego did too. I want to believe that those paintings were composed during parallel moments because of their undying devotion. If I close my eyes, I can see melon wedges left like centerpieces except for the slice Diego put on the table’s corner— one piece of fruit pecked at by a dove that passed through a window. I know that I won’t be building a bookshelf anytime soon and that the chances of me constructing a roll-top desk are as slim as me building an Adirondack chair that sits plumb, but I’m good with the spackle and putty knives in my tool belt. The knots in my back might not be there if I had listened to her suggestions, and I could well have done without two hours of silence over a few holes in the wall. But somehow, life has its ways of working things out. This afternoon, I shut the blinds, turned off the TV, lights, and phone, and massaged my wife’s feet to fight off a migraine— her second one this week despite the prophylactics and pain killers that we store in the breadbox. For once, I’d like to experience what she feels: nausea, blindness, and pain that strike when the cranial vessels dilate, fill with blood, leak, and make the brain swell. Earlier, an MRI triggered the reaction as it mapped her head with electrical current, gradient magnets, and radio waves hammering her floundering eyes. For now, we have our room, the bed frame, and the mattress where she lies as I knead her toes. Come nightfall, I hope that we’ll sit in the patio and watch the breeze stirring the lemon, lime, and orange trees that I planted along the back fence. On certain nights, the moon turns our lawn into green acrylic where we sip Syrah and mint tea until all we know is the sound of our breathing among the whispering leaves.

My wedding-ring lies in a basket as if at the bottom of a well. Nothing will come to fish it back up and onto my finger again. It lies among keys to abandoned houses, nails waiting to be needed and hammered into some wall, telephone numbers with no names attached, idle paperclips. It can’t be given away for fear of bringing ill-luck It can’t be sold for the marriage was good in its own time, though that time is gone. Could some artificer beat into it bright stones, transform it into a dazzling circlet no one could take for solemn betrothal or to make promises living will not let them keep? Change it into a simple gift I could give in friendship?

Wednesday, August 02, 2006 8 a.m. --Mom is wearing a Kailua Surfriders Staff teeshirt this morning. That must be Bryant’s old shirt. No, she insists, it’s an Iowa teeshirt. The young man down the street, the one she’s never met, gave her an Iowa teeshirt when he heard she’d gone to Iowa. It’s Iowa. --I didn’t know she was coming today. -- She was sweet at 4 a.m., Bryant says. They had the first conversation about the shirt then. --Israel sends more ground troops into Lebanon.There’s an opportunity there, we read in the Washington Post. --I don’t like you. I don’t like them. I don’t like them either. And Susan? She laughs. --Compare and contrast the acquisition of a language to its loss. Avoid the trap of merely saying that the latter happens in reverse order of the former. You are likely to do better if you see them as similar processes, though one leads to gain, the other loss. Think chemistry. Think performance of a script. Think Harold and the Purple Crayon. Think Harold Pinter. --Think two old men fishing for a beautiful young woman in a lake. Think one of them might get “lucky.” --When are you leaving? Where are you going? Are you taking the kids? --Sangha and May hatch plots of their own. Go quiet when I arrive. In this life, you either make plots or have them hatched around you. Like eggs. Like poisoned ones. posted by Susan at 6:46 AM 0 comments

Weep for the country in its present state, And of the gloom which still the future waits; The proud confederate eagle heard the sound, And with her flight fell prostrate to the ground! Weep for the loss the country has sustained, By which her now dependent is in jail; The grief of him who now the war survived, The conscript husbands and the weeping wives! Weep for the seas of blood the battle cost, And souls that ever hope forever lost! The ravage of the field with no recruit, Trees by the vengeance blasted to the root! Weep for the downfall o'er your heads and chief, Who sunk without a medium of relief; Who fell beneath the hatchet of their pride, Then like the serpent bit themselves and died! Weep for the downfall of your president, Who far too late his folly must repent; Who like the dragon did all heaven assail, And dragged his friends to limbo with his tail! Weep o'er peculiar swelling coffers void, Our treasures left, and all their banks destroyed; Their foundless notes replete with shame to all, Expecting every day their final fall, In quest of profit never to be won, Then sadly fallen and forever down!