On your wedding day, women were seated
on the Harbour, resting their oars.
Single sculls, in the grace of that spelling,
their canoes, slim as compass needles
pointed at sandstone black with water,
at balconies and wharves and houses,
at sunny bays and lawn-set madhouses,
those châteaux of the upper Harbour,
at the tensioned bridges and their opposites.
Aqaba! A snorkel cleared its throat
and there you were, facing castanets of focus
on your wedding island. Since you’d become happy,
you told me, you’d stopped writing poems.
I should wish you a long silence. I do,
I do, if you mean it. The ribbed iron
feast-hall cruised through courses and clapping
like an airship under fans. The sportswomen
bent, and knitted water in spaced cable-stitch.