To Judith

MEN marry what they need. I marry you,
morning by morning, day by day, night by night,
and every marriage makes this marriage new.

In the broken name of heaven, in the light
that shatters granite, by the spitting shore,
in air that leaps and wobbles like a kite,

I marry you from time and a great door
is shut and stays shut against wind, sea, stone,
sunburst, and heavenfall. And home once more

inside the house of skin and struts of bone,
man-woman, woman-man, and each the other,
I marry you by all dark and all dawn

and have my laugh at death. Why should I bother
the flies about me? Let them buzz and do.
Men marry their queen, their daughter, or their mother

by sounding names, but that thin buzz whines through.
Where reasons are no reason, cause is true.
Men marry what they need. I marry you.

SOMETIMES the floundering fury that directs
the prayer through storm, the sucking mouth;
sometimes a gentleness like a parent sex,
sometimes an aimless tasting mild as broth

or the drugged eye of the invalid, sometimes
the naked arm laid loose along the grass
to the pink-eyed breast and the great terms
of the turning flank printed by root and moss.

Sometimes a country in a white bird’s eye
coasting the shells of cities in their past,
the roads that, stretch to nothing but away,
a horseman wandering in his own dust —

Say you were beautiful those years ago,
flush as the honey-blond who rode the shell
in Sandro Botticelli’s studio,
and what we are now, we were then,

and lost and found again — what shall we wish
to visit from ourselves against their death
but their imagination on our flesh?
There is no other body in all myth.