Traci Brimhall

Epithalamium for a Second Marriage

Marriage is snow on the ocean, I say, how the touch that unites
you is also your undoing, makes you believe mortal love has a
shot with eternity, how that arctic blue beguiles, so close to
forever but failing, like the woman
who married the ghost of a pirate and divorced two years later
because all his aubades were to sunken treasure
and all his valentines were plagiarized from his parrot, and if a
love across the planes of existence can’t last, what chance do
the rest of us have? Marriage is
a wave, you say, a silver sonata with a bone hanging from it,
unraveling. It’s almost enough to make me buy into the
snake’s gospel of knowledge. What good is a shameless
garden anyway? Better the sea, I think. Better the midnight,
the unnamed. But still, when you say you spotted a robin in
the yard, I roll pinecones
in peanut butter and birdseed, efficient as weekday sex. I hang
them from bare branches of the flowering Judas and wait for
now to become raucous with birds, for the pink fury of
blossoms that know they are fruitless. Heaven help me, this
time I do not want to be saved.