2
When I first met her mother, she felt, mostly, relieved:
I hadn't stuffed my feet in cowboy boots or placed,
not yet at least, a chocolate brown or black or white
Western hat on top of all that hair that once bled down
over my shoulders to my back. That one thing no tradition
could ever make me cut. I wanted a cigarette then
and when I spotted an ash tray on the end table, I lit
up and she was so relieved that she lit her own. We
smoked companionably for a while, talked of Susan
and her sisters, her brother, then in Afghanistan on some
artistic mission to learn the colors used in certain rugs.
But when I finished that cigarette, she emptied the tray
and did that each time I would end. Cleanliness was
her chief vice, after smoking. I do not know that she knew
I had been living with her daughter those two years, but
we preserved whatever fiction might exist, that powerful
vision of the virgin bride, the bloody sacrifice, the rood.
3
The wedding was to be simple, a Catholic wedding, yes, but
the priest had greased the way by not demanding that she obey
or that we promise to bring our nonexistent children up
in the straight and narrow way of all those teachings upon which
the Church has fallen and struggles still to rise. He was cool enough
until that night I almost fainted until I saw her walking down the aisle.
And then her mother's friend, the bishop, walked into the room, banners
of spring and flowers of life and cheer waving in the wind
when the door opened. He was there to concelebrate, to whisper
prayers, to bless the wifely womb to see her ensconced in sacred bliss.
He took the book and handed it to Don, my best man, And said, "Kneel,
my son, and hold it up so I can read." I had to hide a laugh when Don
went down upon his knees and held the scriptures up so the old man
in flaming red could read and turn the pages. He looked, the bishop,
not my friend, somewhat surprised when the folk trio sang a Leonard
Cohen song when the ceremony ended and we raced out laughing.
When Don caught up he said, "I thought he was shitting me" and grinned.
4
These were the old networks that bind people tight but that's okay
for those who take to binding. And, yeh, we had the clanking cans
and shoes, but managed to deflect Niagara Falls for weeks in Mexico
City, for Bellas Artes and the Folklorico and the Sierra Madres.
I got married and it was Missouri in August, new in-laws,
Susan in a flowing gown and then a long drive down interstates
to Nueva Laredo, Monterrey, Saltillo, San Luis Potosi. And
there we stayed two days and nights with a squeaking ceiling fan
serenading us and the sounds of church bells in the square sounding
matins, compline, bell rings to remind us of that old book, the bishop,
the first great exhortation we would ignore for five too short years.
No, I can't imagine myself not being married, not anymore, though
it was easier to think in the beginning, that's why lust joins with love
those first years, at least part of the reason, like babies being so cute
and helpless we resist the overwhelming desire at 3 a.m. to throttle them.
And so, I'm 58 years old and married still to the same woman
blessed by an unexpected bishop and have one son to carry on.
