NEW VOWS
When my best friend got married,
he walked down the aisle to a song
about death. Isn’t that what marriage is
all about? he laughed. A promise
to be together until one of you dies?
I regret my wedding vows, too focused
on the benign—our boundless laughter,
how I cherish just waking up together.
I should have said, I take thee and all
the treachery that aliveness guarantees.
I should have said, I will help bury
your elders. I take your hand and your heart
murmur; the cancerous growth above
your father’s ear. I take your family
history of alcoholism and give you back
a possible covenant of dementia, miscarriage,
high blood pressure. In sickness and in
car accidents. In sickness and in the mundane.
Shared calendars and anniversaries spent
arguing about our budget. You told me once
Great Danes have a short life expectancy,
only 6-10 years if you’re lucky, and I cried:
who would sign up to love something
so impermanent? O, beloved, we have
been so happy lately, it’s making us nervous.
And isn’t that what marriage is all about:
a love so darling, so hallowed and exposed,
we both volunteer to be its keeper—when
the joy runs dry, when the body fails—
not because but in glorious spite of
the unpalatable, impossible fact that
someday one of us will wake up first
only to find ourselves alone.