After Knowing

As oldly married
as they were new,
we talked of them
on their honeymoon,
We joked while we drove,
they'd be sorry, soon.

Fresh
from their church wedding,
they showed us their
converted rectory home:
Sun in every room,
curtains like bridal veils,
every window open wide.
But when they talked
it was of leaving
paradise.

We had at least
years of summers,
before we saw the Fall.
Was it so much light
that woke her
early, waking him?
Their bedcovers
dropping
like the leaves
rolling off a flattened snake,
or the gutted frog
on the road built over
the old Sioux trail,
by their home.

She said after knowing him,
she'd remembered
her father's sin.
He said he'd never
learned how to fly.
They thought they might
build another home
in a forest
far away from it all--
or take separate places in town.
And they looked at us,
to tell where the dream
had gone, and why.

In the silence,
we heard the sound
beyond the oak grove,
bees breeding by the lady shrine.
We say it’s up to us to make
a life within what was.
And sometimes
we must remake it again and again.

II.
After their knowing hour,
we drive back,
city bound:
Here-there
glow chested men,
shiny shouldered women,
rise from parks and yards.
There are signs for the Edens freeway
and the sun's bedding down.
Horizon redly mouths
hill shoulders
bared for sleep.
Wheat heats orange.
Weeds meld gold,
blurring border lines.

Let's not go back now;
we're almost back now--
through landing lights
lining roadsites,
garish garnish
of no-turn lanes.

Quick, go sideways
before our day's
cemented into town,
and asleep
side by side
we lie
under the stone
stars of home.

Let's find a still warm field,
curl around each other in a park;
like the fireflies,
do our sparking in the dark.