Lovely Day for a Wedding and Panic.

Greenberg, Arielle

    Some peasants get magic.
   It's not in my blood--pessimism,
   doomed&deserved and a big god
   who is not a wheel.
   When I married the Non, we had it done
   by a tantric Buddhist hippie blue blood professor in Maine,
   left the details wide,
   and he appeared in white cotton gloves
   to perform, he said, the trick:
   transformation via witness, accompanied by silence
   and all our friends dressed in sequins and bow ties
   and holding brass bells on silk ribbons.
   There were flowers we did not even pay for,
   provided by the woman from the geodesic dome, Alda Stitch,
   who we've run into over and over ever since, like a witch.
   All the kids are writing about god these days.
   They convert and de
-. They go to church.
   They use titles like Sufjan uses titles,
   Sufjan named after one major world religion
   and grown up to sing and live through another.
   One side effect of turning into a wife
   is that I now weep from start to end of every rock show I attend.
   I believe more and more in little white sugar pellets
   with miniscule drops of poison in them held under the tongue.
   In story medicine and Do Nothing medicine.
   In the need for seasons and seeds.
   In handwork and weeping.
   In letting death come in its good hour (and I did not know
   I'd believe this if I saw it, but I saw it, and I believed it).
   In needs. In collectives of women making things.
   In my marriage. In my marriage. Its consecration on that day.
   This day. Its longness. Its shiny thread.
   Oh what do I care of going out in the dark
   to walk the dog in my nightgown?
   My nightgown is fat white linen and a hundred years old.