1.  Fast of Gedaliah

 

The way two calendars can overlap but not

Coincide, the one marking the date of a wedding,

Late summer, lakeside, I can almost miss the slant

 

Of full light, hovering not-quite-perfect stillness,

The wind only barely ruffling the surface,

They also seem part of brittle choreographies,

 

A canoe cutting across the face of water,

Its bow wave, rise and fall of tiny yellow leaves,

Silver line of wake, even before it nears shore,

 

I can pick you out, bride and groom, fore and aft,

Paddling leisurely but straight-on-toward,

Your profiles razor-sharp against so much grief,

 

It never quite pulls us under, does it, the other calendar

Marking, even now, blood spilling across a stone floor.

 

 

      2.  Jeremiah

 

That relentless chronicler of catastrophe

Would have approved, I think, of a wedding on the cusp

Of catastrophe, and all the later syncopes,

 

Births, gatherings, anniversaries, interrupting,

However momentarily, the huge green-black wave,

Its slow build behind rooftops, treetops, which we notice

 

Only when it finally breaks or doesn’t quite break

And we lose each other or hold on to each other

The best we can, having (please God) found or made

 

Shelter of a kind, the remains of a room, this, here,

I don’t know how long it will hold, I don’t know when

We will be scattered, again, across the water—

 

Yet the immense flood cancels, even now, nothing.

How bravely, even now, your tiny vessel shines.