for Gretchen and Herb: June 15, 1991 imagine the very first marriage a girl and boy trembling with some inchoate need for ceremony a desire for witness: inventing formality like a wheel or a hoe in a lost language in a clearing too far from here a prophet or a prophetess intoned to the lovers who knelt with their hearts cresting like the unnamed ocean thinking This is true thinking they will never be alone again though planets slip their tracks and fish desert the sea repeating those magic sounds meaning I do on this stone below this tree before these friends yes in body and word my darkdream my sunsong yes I do I do
Copyright © 1996 by Peter Meinke. From Scars by Peter Meinke. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.