THE JUDGE WAS DECENT, BUT...
The judge was decent, but
judge's chambers were judge's chambers,
yellow and municipal
in downtown Ann Arbor. My kids
were dear and anxious.
Jane's brother and sister-in-law, mother,
and father stood up
with us for the rapid legality
we followed with lobster
and champagne at the Gandy Dancer.
Depressed the next
morning, I knew it was a mistake. I was
wrong. We remarried
five years later in New Hampshire, joyful
in a wooden church,
a Saturday afternoon in April,
only Jack Jensen our
friend and minister with us, saying
the prayer book's words
among lilies and wine in holy shadow.
*
It didn't matter that
I had toasted the Queen at Oxford
while Jane crayoned
into her Coronation Coloring Book.
Married in the spring,
we flew to London in September, ate
pub lunches, visited
friends in Cambridge, and found a Maltese
restaurant in Kensington.
We learned how to love each other
by loving together
good things wholly outside each other.
We took the advice of my
dear depressed and heartsick Aunt Liz,
who wrote us at our flat
in Bloomsbury: "Have fun while you can."
— Donald Hall
from The Old Life, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996
All that is required to feel that here and now is happiness
is a simple... heart.
~ Nikos Kazantzakis
Love/Life Poems
