Karin: Aliass, if we know anything together, it's how every one of these words I'm about to say is hard-won. Every word here is hee-hawn out of fur and flesh, ceaseless hoofbeats on asphalt, rock, and cool water, and hidden milk and blood. Each word I want to offer you is made out of the places we've passed through in time together. They grow from seeds gathered on our wanderings, wading through roadside weeds and broken glass, in search of something--maybe the place of love, the green peace of ass we have finally found, here and now. I wish I could just open my throat and let a flock of birds fly out of it, or maybe a stampede of slow Mississippi miles. I want to make a noise that also listens. Aliass, I wish I could mirror you in a language that rises out of the future dark like beams of what's coming from behind, like a silver flash of a fish from the bluegreen depths, or the way a rearview mirror reflects oncoming lights from where we've already passed: and let these words be a glistening eye and a long listening ear that are reflections of the mysteries of what you are, and what you do. And where we will go from here.
When I married you the first time, Aliass, some might have said I was looking for love in all the wrong places. But what did they know? Hoo knows what we are looking for, listening for, and hoo knows how we got here. But we did. We found green fire at last, sweet she-ass. And today we get to celebrate it, and share it with our friends. And to those who would oppose our union, claiming that you are just an ass, I can only answer that they have no idea what a wise, just ass you are.
In light of our last ceremony, and everything that's happened in the meantime, it seems like a good idea to renew the vows that were both spoken and unspoken on that occasion. That first ceremony, which took place in the secret bottom of the local park in Paris, Tennessee, was a slapdash, threefold affair; it sought to encompass all the elements of a shotgun wedding, a heraldic dubbing, and a haphazard exchange of rings and kisses and vows meant to hold us fast to each other, and to the pathless grasses of the mission we were about to blast off into. I was a little drunk on Early Times, and wearing an enormous sombrero, so I don't remember exactly what I said. Yours was a vow of silence, and you've likely kept it better than I've kept mine. Raw as it was, that Tennessee ass wedding must have done some of the trick, or I suppose we wouldn't be standing here together now. This doesn't surprise me, actually. For all the rush and lack of planning, that thrown-together ceremony was overflowing with sacrament and rough magic, and was deeply felt by all present, as far as we know. Sweet Pea stood up for you, and Mariann stood in as barnyard preacher, while our snake-hunting buddy Sebastian acted as witness and photographer. To get to the wedding spot, we rode a thin bridal path, through yellow grass that was taller than all the asses, past Rahkeem's catfish pond. The whirring cicadas sang us onward, watching us pass with their red eyes that never blink. The monstrous catfish that no human has ever seen skimmed the pondbottom with their blind, o-ring mouths and wormy whiskers - lazy bottomfeeders in sunken barrels and logs. These were the congregation of guests.
Along the path, we plucked orange butterfly weed and bluets and black-eyed susans, and stuck them in your browband and saddle, and Sweet Pea's. I held a bunch of stems in a bouquet. Then we emerged from the green thicket into an out-of-the-way, newly-mown corner of the park, and assembled ourselves between the telephone poles, back behind the baseball diamond and the field where we hunted for wild asparagus the night before. It was just on the other side of the abandoned traintracks, which we crossed to reach the wedding spot and then rode over again, like a threshold, after Mariann proclaimed, "You may now kiss your ass!" And then you and I rode off a ways down the track, back and forth, together and alone, and soon to be on the way for real.
So I guess it's in keeping with our assbackwards slide into new love to exchange our real marriage vows here and how, almost a year after the beginning of our rough ass honeymoon. Our adventure of last summer wasn't so much a honeymoon, in fact, as a two-moon mission, where we blastd into the new reality of American backroads to discover, among other things, the deepest echoes of our Big Poet's assertion that "the honey of heaven may or may not come, but that of earth both comes and goes at once" (Wallace Stevens). We hit the highway and searched for it. We hit the earth inside us and we dug. We rode the byways, hundreds of miles of rank tar rolled out under swooping wires, hot open-beaked starlings, green leaves and sky. Oh ass, there were roadside weeds and creeper vines inside of us, chicory and Queen Anne's lace and poison ivy, and we waded through wave after wave of them, day after day after day. . . . (next)