(and not counting...)
A bright, cool, beautiful morning like this one — especially this one — seems the perfect time to share one of my favorite poems from one of my favorite poets.
It’s a delicate, deceptively simple little piece about a delicate, deceptively complex part of life and love. It’s the best, most beautiful poem I’ve ever read about marriage. And it’s the lovely, lyrical refrain I can not, any October 26th — or most days, for that matter — get out of my head or of my heart.
Enjoy...
Most Like an Arch This Marriage
John Ciardi
Most like an arch — an entrance which upholds
and shores the stone-crush up the air like lace.
Mass made idea, and idea held in place.
A lock in time. Inside half-heaven unfolds.
Most like an arch — two weaknesses that lean
into a strength. Two fallings become firm.
Two joined abeyances become a term
naming the fact that teaches fact to mean.
Not quite that? Not much less. World as it is,
what’s strong and separate falters. All I do
at piling stone on stone apart from you
is roofless around nothing. Till we kiss
I am no more than upright and unset.
It is by falling in and in we make
the all-bearing point, for one another’s sake,
in faultless failing, raised by our own weight.
Posted
Oct 26 2009, 10:55 AM
by
Chad