Poetry

The wedding lawn

Elizabeth Smither

Almost a year has passed since the wedding

came over the grass: the veils and feet

 

the clinking of champagne glasses, the rounding-up

(by a slightly-inebriated photographer) of the whole group

 

into a crescent between the low box hedges

where every plant played its part and even

 

the buds seemed promising. The white roses

gleamed like smiles and teeth. What holds

 

the recollection here still on the grass

in the lightly-moving breeze and the sun?

 

Not just fancy, though no footprint remains

and the flowerbeds have been weeded again and again—

 

it might be numbers, like the number of cattle

that bring a field to something like fruition:

 

the reason the grass exists. Here it was passion,

an old and true passion revived for a day.

 

The years they’d cohabited fell away

as if they swooned. The bride and her bouquet

 

advanced across the grass and through an arch

pinned with ivy leaves. A dark piano gleamed.

 

The grass shone and shone and surrendered to

the sky, the clouds, the breeze. The bride, with

 

foreknowledge, waved from the wedding car

before she alighted in the drive.