Epithalamion

GOLDEN JUBILEE

            for Karen

Working my way towards you

in our full time, in bed

before sleep, the one

whose sun rise confirms

50 years together

(54 years of knowing),

you watching tv

in the living room,

crossing time, across

time, not automatic

or even earned--beyond luck

grace acknowledged,

comic and worse

in my failures, but never

without desire for you,

your presence and quiet vision.

I had to grow into it

You sat it out until I did

Four years

Two years plus months of separation

Two years of letters

I'm still pissed off at the photographer

the way he missed desire

choreographing his American lie,

who made those men chosen to witness

what we were publicly saying, Yes,

how he framed me,

wrong, wrong, no. Not this.

What did I know of ceremony? Marriage?

Beyond what must be turned towards, walking?

A boy from North Dakota,

returned from Southeast Asia,

feeling catalog pages for clothes,

that awkward, that too, witnessed.

That photographer who choreographed

all that arrived exhausted from the 1950s,

requiring me to be picked up and carried

against my will, to the altar, when

I couldn't, had only one word to say,

Yes, (waiting too for yours),

even fearful, a kind of surfacing terror

in me, to say, shout, Yes,

all manner of yes, to be united

in public word. To make a love story
one could believe in.

                        When does marriage begin?

For me, years before I would know you,

timeless time without knowing

how to be your husband,

magnificent Christ-star vision,

years before your ring would show me

it can't be done alone.

Premonitions of knowing

even as the shutter, obedient

before the photographer's finger,

recorded what we would be up against,

stepping out in love, minutes

before you would appear

disturbing, shaking, unshackling me.

Jim Bodeen

November, 2018