09 May 2006

Sunrise, Soccer, Trust, Weirdness and Dr. Pepper

protect me from what i want

For Kat and Mark on Their Wedding Day
May 7, 2006

Prologue
"He did not consider if or how or why he loved her. She was just love. She was the first evidence he ever had of love, and she would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away."
Zadie Smith, On Beauty

Remembering Dinner

Last night that fresh hard rain came, those summer shifts of wind and dappled light.
And the earth's languor rose fresh, bright green foliage glistening from the rain,
illumined by the golden hour of lat summer sun light -- one of those May afternoons
you hold like a funny, ticking glow in the heart that revisits you on those cool winters
soon to come -- warmed and lifted, years hence -- on back porches, amid screen door
slams and lights flickering and buzzing like those fireflies and cicada songs -- with
an innocence that rents the heart.

Let the spring stay -- its tenderness of balanced leaves and singing grass. And look,
dear friends, with the slight quick eye-tear of love -- love not a flicker, love not a
surge of unanswered questions, of uncertainty -- but instead a steady gaze, a firm
hand, a movement, though lamentable of lost youth and that sweet torture of
adolescent longing -- into a rolling, steady-gripped wheel of sweeter summers, gardens --
and the foot-forward journey shared, given wholly

to the certainty of kisses that stop too-busy traffic, toward water-worn harbors, toward
that large, leaden, waiving, dangerous mass of life, together now -- and on and on through
Mays and Junes and sweet summers yet seen. There is always the rising as there are always
falls, as our breathing, as the sun and the moon and the sea. May you ride the rising and
the fall. It is a wave, after all, that carries us all, along.

Epilogue
I wish for you both the remembrance of where your love began -- and that you feel that
tenderness, no matter where the weather takes you -- every day of your lives together.