Epithalamium: Fourteenth Hour

This day unseals the door to a hidden path
That brings you to a garden’s grafted branch,
Adopted vines that ripen fruit by oath
And, pouring pure from heart and vessel, quench
The thirst: the day is given memory
To speak with antiquity –
Like Greeks, we break fast with feast, splash drink with song,
And dance with laughter, leavening moiety
Of minutes into countless moments, feeding
Hilarity’s mind with frothy melody.
The crust of levity
Sops the soup of charm and saucy wit. The meat
Is celebration’s common cause: a dance
With the bride (the groom, accosted by aunts
And cornered by cousins, never gets to eat).
Like novice Bacchae, boys patrol, picking up
Neglected glass and cup
And down each, loathe to waste what comes to this –
That nature drinks its sunset song in the key of grace.