ON THE OCCASION OF OUR MARRIAGE, OCTOBER 7, 1994
I touch your cheek
and another teleologist dies
of an apparent heart attack in a Fresno motel,
the ninth this week,
and the coroner is noticing similarities:
all men over 40;
first names beginning with the letter D;
all found clad only in pale blue boxer shorts
from Mervyn’s,
size Medium;
all displaying the same questionable use
of the semi-colon
in the anguished poems about their childhoods
left uncompleted on the chipped Formica desktops.
And that just when I touch your cheek.
When I touch your throat
(O sweet swooning Jesus and the radiantly
melting Buddha, too)
every tweed-weenie professor
who has mistaken an impenetrable vocabulary
for knowledge
and every high school teacher who has lied to a class
is struck dumb at the toll of midnight;
and all the politicians in the Western Hemisphere
drop to their knees, begging forgiveness;
and the last practicing existentialist,
after years of contemplating the intrinsic being
of an apple,
finally eats it.
Which moves me to kiss you
(Ah, lunar delirium; oh, raw unending diamond nova
of the sun)
and when our lips touch
every bird in flight folds its wings and glides,
and every bird at roost and babe unborn
dreams of turning its belly to the sun,
and the Northcoast is lashed with two weeks of
torrential rain
until a man snaps, screams
“There ain’t no head like steelhead,”
and hurls himself from the Hiouchi Bridge
into the swollen Smith
while an old woman in buckskins and cowboy boots
drops osprey feathers on the spot he hit, chanting
“Take him home, Momma, take him home.”
Meanwhile, as our kiss continues
on the balcony of the Museum of the Future,
I feel honey swirl in my loins
(oh, thick golden nurture! ah, happy bees!)
and every tree for 500 miles deepens its green,
cones open, pods split and spill,
plum saplings bow to the rising storm
and a majestic old sugar pine rocks on its roots–
and then the balcony tears loose
and we’re falling, still in each other’s arms, falling . . .
And no, it hasn’t all been a romp through the buttercups,
but after 30 years more or less shared,
of catch-as-catch-can, itch and scratch,
four-lane all-night fliers that left us dirty side up
in the ditch,
of handing our asses to the gods above
while digging our toes in the earth,
I’d say we’re still falling,
falling in love.