for matt and sara's wedding

It's rare that I genuinely enjoy a wedding. But it's rare that I enjoy people as much as I do these two. You should look at Sara's impressive wedding blog.

Beyond What
Alice Walker

We reach for destinies beyond
what we have come to know
and in the romantic hush
of promises
perceive each
the other's life
as known mystery.
Shared. But inviolate.
No melting. No squeezing
into One.
We swing our eyes around
as well as side to side
to see the world.

To choose, renounce,
this, or that --
call it a council between equals
call it love.

I love this poem for the way it departs from one convention of weddings. There is a moment in most ceremonies that leaves me a little mournful: the one when it's pronounced that two amazing individuals, each of whom I love separately, have become One. It makes it seem as if love's ultimate effect is to reduce by half the number of wonderful people in the world, and I'm pretty sure that we can't spare them. I prefer to think of it as a pooling of resources; a collaboration that will allow each of you to better reach for destinies beyond what we have come to know.

Today, in my mind, rather than melting, rather than squeezing into one, your vow is to forever amplify one another's unique capacity to live well, to engender beauty, to nurture justice, to generate love. Thinking of it this way allows me to celebrate without reserve this most inspiring and joyful council between equals. My wish is that the destinies for which you together reach will enrich your own lives and spirits and immensely as they already do ours, you beautiful two.

big bang

or: between the lines of text messages.

u r nowhere close 2 Forgiven

unfolding your message
like the map it is not,
i translate:
u r hopelessly lost.

unforgiven and aimless,
i'll buck against the straps of
your grudge.

as i chafe, you'll bruise;
i'll be
sorrier.

rampantly
sorrier.

i'll stomp
every wrong i've done
into the shit and mud and straw.

i'll snap and bound and
vault like a brahma;
u r still just a jackass.

i'll rage
against this stasis.

bellowing
my humanity,
i'll absolve
my own damn self.

here:
is my guilt,
cast off, undigested, shining
pearl of
you-were-right.

forgive me
or don't--
your anger is tiny
against stars.

it is a firefly
in a universe
born of mistakes.

you
are right

and i
am infinite.

uncapped

maybe a little too syrupy-sweet & sentimental...if you have a sensitive gag reflex that is triggered by Precious Moments figurines and the like, proceed with caution.

Amongst the faded school portraits, off-center snapshots and blurred Polaroids in our family album is a series of noticeably sharper photos of me, my brother, and my uncle Randy in the forest. I don’t know if it’s my imagination, but just as the pictures are more vivid, so are my memories of the moments they captured. Evidence, perhaps, against the belief that snapping a picture steals a bit of the moment or the subject; maybe it’s the opposite. Maybe it enhances the moment and the subject’s memory of it, but the memory is only as sharp as the picture. That would explain why my memories of my teen years are so fuzzy. And why celebrities don’t seem to get Alzheimer’s.

Randy was by far my youngest uncle, and I adored him. At some point, he and his girlfriend were amateur photographers—as everyone is required to be at some point in their young lives—and they asked my brother and me to be their subjects. They envisioned some sort of heartwarming children-in-nature photo shoot, I suppose, fall colors being very much in sync with the palette of late-‘70s fashion. I knew nothing of fashion or hackneyed themes, but the proposition of a walk in the forest with Randy was worth jumping at. He let us go as slow as we wanted, never seeming to mind when we’d squat over a patch of clover to look for one with four leaves, or become otherwise fascinated and still. He never forced us to talk, and when he did speak, it was in a soft voice, using words that I could understand. Too, he talked to me and my brother separately. Most adults treated us as a unit, asking us questions that seemed to require a single answer from the both of us. On our walks, I could count on Randy walking beside me for a ways, saying one or two things, not minding when I only nodded in response.

I wore my poofy orange coat, my beloved orange coat. Ryan and Randy were in navy blue—baseball- and poofy- style, respectively. We walked along the train tracks, my favorite route. I couldn’t tell you what the trees looked like, or the sunlight filtering through them, or the sky: I kept my eyes on the ground. That’s where the magic is, especially in a Rhode Island autumn, and especially when you’re five. It’s a particularly enthralling kind of beauty that you see in a bright yellow leaf at precisely the same moment that you stomp on it.

At some point, Randy stopped our wanderings and sat us down under an oak tree. He posed us, backs against the tree, next to each other, closer than we normally cared to be. My eyes were on the ground, still; my fingers raked through the dry grass and oak-tree debris. I picked up an acorn, cupped it in my palm, and looked at the acorn cap in my other hand. Here's the epiphany: I realized that they were supposed to be together; that they used to be together; that each acorn had one, single cap that would fit it perfectly. The cap in my fingers didn’t fit the acorn in my palm. I tried another, and another, and, unfazed, others. I knew, somewhere in my mind, that I would try every cap on every acorn in Rhode Island until I found the one that fit. I kept my back against the tree and my shoulder touching Ryan’s--as we had been posed--but I had sunken into fascination.

At some point, my brother craned his neck to see what I was doing. He watched for a moment before twisting back around (his back still against the tree, his shoulder touching mine), picking up an acorn and some caps. He put them in his lap to be examined and sorted; I continued my piles on the ground.

All the while, there was a faint noise in the background, one that barely entered my consciousness. “Laurie, would you look up for just a minute? Into the camera?—Okay, um, Ryan? You too, buddy. Look over there!” Randy’s voice remained gentle as he repeated the request thousands of times and I remained hunched over, oblivious. Eventually tuning in, I might have been a little annoyed with this distraction; I don’t remember. I looked up, but my hands continued to feel the ground for another cap, to try it on the acorn, to add it to the misfit pile. It must not have been long before my gaze was pulled back to the ground, and I’d hear Randy’s voice again. It was like being at the dentist—you can never open your mouth wide enough, long enough, for him. You want to, and you feel bad that he has to constantly remind you, but somehow you’ve lost a little bit of control over your mouth, which keeps involuntarily closing. So did my head keep drifting down, my eyes insisting on getting a better view of the task at hand.

The pictures are beautiful—rich colors, sharp details—much more professional than anything else in our photo album. Our small figures at the base of the tree are vivid orange and deep blue, and it’s nice to be able to see that sunlight-filtered-by-branches thing that I had overlooked. They look kind of like the picture that comes in a frame when you buy it. It’s pretty, but the people are anonymous. The fact that these photos, these records of my first realization about the world, don’t contain my face is my own fault, of course. Personally, I think it’s perfect: this image of the tops of our little heads, as uncapped as acorns.