Epithalamium: Twenty-fourth Hour

Oh, muse, did you call back to say you’re well?
My singing ends, I know, much too self-conscious -
Invoking music’s mirrors with selfish spells.
My friends, I run the risk of Narcissus,
But agitate his placid pool –
And pray this paltry poem's shallow puddles
Reflects the truth you’ve tapped with love in deeper wells.

Epithalamium: Twenty-third Hour

Wisconsin is middle earth to a child;
Its intercessory night shines with light
Once day is put away – a treasury filled
With gold that keeps the promise of its weight
Long after the sun’s tabernacle door
Has closed, and long before
Night’s temple curtain falls, expanding time
And multiplying stars in dark divide
Allowing God’s reprieve – a prayer – to climb
The planes and angles of contemplation
As each constellation
Is held by beauty’s will. Let it be done:
As two souls join in revolution, conferred
In tight orbit around their nuptial word,
They give their starry multitude but one
Fixed house of heaven, one configuration
Incandescent as love – the mystical rose
Nature cannot see but knows to be the key of grace.

Epithalamium: Twenty-second Hour

Well, look at the time. If we die alone
It’s justice that we should. The century
That passed has gone as deep and clear to bone,
And tells us to stifle, hush and bury
Our little homicides of heart and soul
Despite the yawning hole
That cannot be argued away. The child
Is deaf to sloganeering vitriol,
Knowing only life and love, both defiled
By minds divorced from heaven, wedding hell
To queered political
Predilections Cain possessed to murder
His brother’s duty, giving birth to rights
Without responsibility. Love waits,
Though, patient for assent from the mother
To receive mankind’s universal face
Fathered in time and space.
We do not die alone and we know this –
For death by nature cannot turn the key of grace.

Epithalamium: Twenty-first Hour

The beauty of night is merely darkness
For those who never bother with the stars
Beyond the first – Lucifer nèe Venus,
A distant sun of indistinct desires
That serves as dusk’s out-riding fugitive.
Its light is meant to give
Some dim indication of sullen gloom.
But rising moon and fulgent stars contrive
To arbitrate the glory bride and groom
Will bless with seed and womb.
The moon resets her jewel within night’s crown;
Ascending, silver-throned, a queen who grants
These newest lovers light’s discrete romance,
And grave regard commingles with light renown,
Reflecting pools of joy with deeper joy.
The moon is love’s envoy
And magnifies the mysteries of darkness –
Which nature cannot solve without the key of grace.

Epithalamium: Twentieth Hour

Peeper frogs intone a choired serenade,
A final refrain to hush the bonfires,
Last guests lingering in toadstool promenade,
Until each echo expires and retires
In search of rest with the imitation dead
Who take the night to bed.
The bride and groom, though, rise to their heaven,
Awake, alone, and led
Along candled corridors to a shrine
Of their making, where private hymns rehearse
Entwining wreath and thyrse,
And vows that made a debt are paid with pleasure.
So rain will fall to rescue wasted lands
From drought, and fuel the seedling’s green demands -
The swelling promise, a loving partner
In God’s creation, gift of soil and root,
From sprout to rigid shoot.
Imprisoned outer darkness knows but this –
Its nature can't be free without the key of grace.

Epithalamium: Nineteenth Hour

At night yesterday’s nearer than tomorrow –
Perhaps because the sundown sadness of grief
Bristles chill against the skin, a sorrow
You own up to the way a summer leaf
Will blush and betray its autumn destiny
(The fall is sanctity
Writ large). The fading colors argue sleep…
And stars will blink their maps of unity
To brave the cries and whispers that would keep
Awake with unwarranted vigilance
The doubts that had long since
Been put to bed. This dark margin is slight
But draws out from hearts the poison of distance
And cradles moments that make the difference
Between passing hours and constant moonlight.
The moon wears her light like a wedding gown
And slowly dresses down
From sky to earth – and to what darkness is
Denied by its nature without the key of grace.

Epithalamium: Eighteenth Hour

All day, the wit of wine and laughing friends
Were joy’s company on the sun’s journey.
But as these light things have their own ends,
Allow yourselves the means of intimacy –
A whisky bottle, cigarettes, a kiss
And roads to reminisce,
The country rides and city boulevards
Where public courtship serves love’s interstice.
Again, art assaults what modesty guards…
Original touches sing a sweet refrain –
On parched hearts, a soft rain;
The simple gesture casts a cooling shadow,
The kind that’s welcomed in desert places.
Such expressions appear as oases -
Amid empty eternities, they flow
With fertile faith and overspill with mirth
Because on all the earth
No other night unlocks the stars like this.
Indeed, the world’s dark nature finds no key of grace.