For Yet Another Wedding

Before we turned left onto the one-way runway, before we fell
apart, before everything we owned was due in six hours

or so—they say (and who are they but our
former and future selves in funnier hats)—they say we once

were happy there in the blue-green country where we
each stood separately, apart from the worries of the other,

that named twin who for each of us took on private
resonance, luminescence. Since Memorial Day

has come and gone, and since your hair has weathered
the dry prairie wind, gone brittle and limp,

since men have catcalled and pratfalled and fallen
all over, landing everywhere but atop

you (well there was that one, and then that other fellow—
but he doesn’t count), since back before the dream

of returned-for-too-little-postage, since the night
I didn’t kiss you in the falling dark and drunk,

but shrunk back, afraid of my own second story
apartment. Until the grey secedes in sheets of yellow,

washing over all, and the bottle of gin requires no
reminder from the vermouth, until the memorization

of the metric-English conversion charts, until all
of Auden makes sense, and rules for engagement are no

different than the conditions for a successful summer
fling, until my holy Cuban ancestors ride by in a procession

of bright bicycles. After this, after all, after the final
phone call I won’t be home to answer, after the missed

wedding and the naughty bridal shower, after the honey
moon and the clover honey and the slow dying summer,

after I remember what brought us here, what kept us
invisible but audible to the other, what rent us, lovingly, apart.