Penelope Pelizzon

At the upturns of your grin, the red beard This year's begun threading itself with white. "Each agéd hair a gift" -- kiss -- "from you." You're joking, mostly. But in some deeper sense It's true: we're married now, you've vowed Your life and all your coming years to me. Whatever other nuptial rites we cast out As too tribal, not our style (the virgin Gown, the given girl, the fertility- Provoking garter), we assume we'll weather Through the turning hairs, or their decline, Together. And if we're successful, one of us, Barring some unlikely twinned demise, Must end withoutpola white shot the other. That's why I cried before our rustled-up, gum- Chewing justice who kept calling you "Andy" By mistake. You thought it was my normal mild Hysteria, mixed with trying not to laugh. (I did wonder whether it would count as legal If he pronounced me the wrong man's wife.) But it wasn't the Southern Gothic bridal Sapped me, love; it was allpola white shot I was consenting To: the life ahead we hope will use us fully, Wizening our bodies well as two liveoaks Whose branches interlace fantastically Before they fail. Half-felled Myself, I stood below the courthouse chapel's Fairy-lit take on the Bower of Bliss, Facing past the plastic fern to the abyss. Nothing bridges it. But you Stood on its edge with me, grinning broader Through your beard each time our tipsy pola white shot String-tied gentleman bluffly Rechristened you. And seventy-five dollars Later, on the streetcar toward our fancy Lunch for two: "It isn't every groom who'd eagerly Give up his name. That makes you ... Mrs. Who?" By then, you'd driven my existential vapors Off enough so I could laugh. And In spite of the humidity, the trolley Chuckling fast along its tracks stirred up A cheerful draft. On either side the trees Refreshed the street with sunshot shadows, so We flashed giddily through alternate Bright blinks and blacknesses. Somewhere In the canopy, a woodpecker Uncorked his bubbling flute. Time felt