Poetry from The Literary Review



Epithalamion

MICHAEL KLEIN


It doesn't always feel like work.
Someone in a tree called James for help and James
went until that season broke, and then he walked a line of snow,
the snow sedate and marginless in Cambridge, into a plow and worked all night.
Marie walked too, and wrote. I was in another light, but in the other room a lot.
That was the first day.
Then, in nineteen-ninety-something, I thought of something
at the exact moment I knew it was true: “Have you looked at James?”
I said. Long looked? And she thought she had, but hadn't changed
places with him or counter-sunk in the look–the shock when
a gaze exacts a careless gesture–strewn, say–the way flowers and Billy and Michael are strewn, and James's saxophone got strewn through cigarettes and every week brought out another book by a friend and Nick and Tony and Richard gathered at the table all that year, looking at Marie, looking at James.
Reading, when they weren't looking.
And next to the look that left Marie and James because it had
the future in it, some people died and went back. And the long look was a shining now from a well the grief made. And every death made
Marie more living because the part of her that wanted to go part way
to meet the just-left brother, the just-left sister–that part, sped up–the way spring,
then summer did. And finally, in the lapse between living and dying,
in the academic town's only beauty: Magnolia! the gauze made from summer lightning
in a tree. Cambridge opened out and the book was through.
And James had a boat, small enough and big enough
to rock in the well and not break. Marie did too, but she couldn't see it. Or maybe
it was her boat, so she didn't have to look.
Before the boat, there was a tree–a tree James didn't have to work.
And he pulled Marie into it from her sadness
and her Catholic standing start, until the tree shook because of them
and then shook with them in it. I watched from the other room of ground and loved them
in the tree: two aerial someones off the ground just high enough to be together.
I love them now. And still looking, I love so many singing things. I see
our shining brother Billy sleeping in the corner of this. Marriage
is a dream he's having. And brother John sleeping, too, but still talking
to Marie in her dream. That was the second day.
And the third.
And now they run together: Marie in her dream and his and James in his and hers.
Man and woman looking into a well, less suddenly now. Brother and sister thirst.
This man and this woman, looking at what has sprung because of and still sustains the well: The boat. And the rocking. The boat and the rocking until it is a boat again.