Matrimonial Toast 

My dear near-to-hearts, commoners and peers, miscreants,
Cluniacs and other such habitués, the day of my wedding
is every day. Let us be thankful for the long
perpetually animate hands of John Berryman

tweaking the guylines of his Pal, Mr. Bones. And let us hope 
that if he were here he might extend that glorious pallor
of his index finger, that skeletal and elegant baton
toward the podium to bless this union 
                                                         over here
                                                           and other such wonders 
                                                              we’re sitting on.
Credit

Copyright @ 2014 by Ken White. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-a-Day on May 7, 2014.

About this Poem

“My new manuscript—a medieval melodrama set in contemporary Los Angeles—is populated by rock stars and warrior-kings, werewolves and archivists, sartorial Huns and libertine saints. ‘Matrimonial Toast’ is of course a direct homage to Berryman, but also functions as a benediction for the soon-to-be and long-since doomed who populate its pages, and as fair warning to the reader that the first well-intentioned step set down on the other side of the Acheron will initiate a sequence of carnal catastrophe, a conniption of camp, a nuptial of transformation and the inadvertently divine.”

—Ken White