Where the Arrows Fell

V. 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 without 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 all 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

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

Suspended, balancing between symmetric

Poles where gravity is countered by

Velocity as, years before, our bodies

Pressed together learned to take the hair-

Pin curves along a coastal cliff by gently

Leaning with the motorcycle's angle

Toward the road.

Then you turned to me

And, with a question, broke the spell. Remember

How I answered you? "I will. It's true. I am. I do."