After the Wedding

In the preface to my last essay, I said I would lay down all complicated feelings and enjoy my son’s wedding. I managed to do both. But all the feels went somewhere, and I learned (again), though I already know, I’m not the only one trying to let go, to make sense of them, to put them down.

Lucille Clifton’s poem, “blessing the boats, was the centerpiece of my wedding toast. It was especially apt since we had the ceremony on a ninety-foot schooner moored in the middle of Gloucester bay.

It’s tempting to belabor all the life metaphors the ocean provides but I wanted to avoid that, so when someone shared Clifton’s austere and profound poem, I knew I would offer that to my son and daughter-in-law instead.

Everything you want to say about love, ambiguity, and fear in thirteen lines. And, of course, it isn’t just about boats.

blessing the boats   (at St. Mary's) Lucille Clifton                                   may the tide that is entering even now the lip of our understanding carry you out beyond the face of fear may you kiss the wind then turn from it certain that it will love your back     may you open your eyes to water water waving forever and may you in your innocence sail through this to that

The following poem, the one I end with, isn’t a companion poem exactly but it fits. It ambushed me in a workshop I took nine days after the wedding. Once a poem conveys all the hard things obliquely or in metaphor the mind may be baffled but the heart understands. Then there’s no need for explanation.

driving with my son six days after his wedding

you are in the passenger seat of your own car when your son says, I sometimes wonder in what world would you and dad talk to each other the road winds through a seacoast town a bay on your right the tide has receded you know how that mud sucks ravenous because once you were in it trying to lift your foot and step forward your answer is another question, Is that what you want? from space the atmosphere is a faint and fragile blue but under it’s aegis we breathe together from where you sit the sky hard blue and pure as an iceberg crashes through the windshield you catch your breath everyone still intact (September 2025)

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