“That all the woods may answer, and your eccho ring.”
–Edmund Spenser
Like the feet that root deep to walk the ground
with circling steps that no one of us can hear,
or the leaves that die just to coil down
through lost blossoms and wait to reappear—
petal, stamen, pistil and fragrant dust
sing with the pollen’s trust.
And as each fruit that drips down the earth’s strong chin
spills new sugar over an ancient face,
we all hold seeds that vibrate alive within,
and every hardened pod pulls the world’s embrace
from a new hiding place.
As oceans, deserts, rivers, and forests move
with the spinning bodies, sounding hearts,
surfacing eyes and searching wings of love;
and the one and many, whole and parts,
touch to blend, to marry in their own time,
to keep all movings’ rhyme:
let your two waiting hearts ring together; bring
warmth to emptiness, memory to the full,
home to the night. You hear longest echoes ring
again; you hear how each lunging particle
rocks in a surging lull,
wise and ready, certain to move with love,
salt and sweet and spiralling open worlds,
holding, braided, careful, the voices of
desire and honor. Reach for your unfurled
openness to rock through the earth again, to come,
new and empty, among
every creature. Then keep a steady song,
sounding the ways that marriage, compassion’s tool,
rough strong teacher of joy, right-gathering wrong,
oldest puzzle, simple yet tangled rule,
moves, in each molecule.
Marriage is a field where the planet’s skin
stretches and wakes open in fertile seeds,
moving patterns through couples. They begin
as shadowed furrows, whose every sowing leads
time-fed opposites, soaked in day and night,
to reach each others’ height.
Goddesses, gods of weddings, help this pair
pair with abundance, to curl wide and alive
with each leaf they send through the long beauty.
Grow them with the roots and the care to thrive.
Harvest them, where they strive.
And as the earth and heat form their crystal sides,
Leaping into the shapes listening patterns hold
Since the long-gone births of their silent guides
Still work minerals into that secret fold,
Fanning space, cleaving it with energy
Birthed of polarity—
Bend them together in fire, and in earth,
Willing difference into the ground of change,
Mixing powers until a hard new birth,
A tender metamorphosis rearranged,
Stays both the same and strange.
Just as in the deepest cold far caves
(the emptiest solid reach of oldest space,
where the stars and solitude grow), black holes
shimmer open thickly with dark to trace
sameness empty, let fill multitudes the same,
speaking out the never-name,
universes steady and climates clear
at the linking spaces where love exhales.
Breathe again, with such passion you’ll pull back near,
voicing closeness down through love’s fountained trails,
humming the ancient scales.
Feel yourselves how the bluejay, eagle, swallows,
cardinal, doves and finches, sparrows, terns,
move with long-held wings, find the surge that follows,
dips, fills, rises to pour back up and burns
through warm mornings (or brief songs from trees,
as forests darken to ease—)\
how fox, moose, crocodile and koala bear,
elephant, cheetah, deer and cat and squirrel
cry with single breaths until they may pair,
ears and mouths poured open while bodies skirl
towards the enspiralled whirl.
Let your bodies make a body of bodies—cool
With the pores of a question, rich and warm
With answers quickening to beat and roll and spool
Through the lost space anchored only by love’s vast charm,
till pools of kiss and hope and remembering meet,
crossed in a sculpting heat.Enter, oh, enter the language of your skins,
where motion mentions silence, and words spill light
over the actual air; let your touch begin
spinning separate souls in one open flight
towards one believed delight.
And you’ll reach, with the meanings that humans bid
Two more minds to touch from balanced pairs—
Intersection of line to pyramid,
Uncornered circling, edging angles, squares—
Long paradoxes, shaped by geometry’s
Aisled community.Goddesses, gods of weddings, bend your strengths
Over your weaving promises and go
Past the edges of partnership, through the lengths
Of the days that are moving us, fast or slow,
From everything we know.
Marriage is the mirror and crucible
Where a true plain face turns to see its own
Fullness empty, its emptiness made full
In the shadows that blended love and bone,
Half-invisible, burned clear by the light,
Cast under mutual sight.
Goddesses, gods of weddings, press your hearts
Wide to reflect the earth, till they touch and share
Knowledge, patience, consciousness—human arts—
In wild bodies, and intersperse, and dare
Bend in the planet’s care.
Now, goddesses, gods, make marriage. Take your hands
in the sight of these people and the earth,
and one bird finds rest in a valleyed cove,
and more birds take flight in new kinds of birth.
Touch your hands. Touch words. Oh, now turn and bless
each with that happiness—
your family, earth, friends, guests and the binding day.\
Open us with a heart to hear every test,
brave to reach everything we will need to say,
strong to hold our silences, find our rest—
wise, to believe love best.