Letty Lane's Wedding Day - Poem

Literary Review, Spring, 2002 by Geoffrey O'Brien

Letty Lane's Wedding Day

   On so many corners
   Groups of cousins
   Bunched like bouquets

   Busied themselves with light and weather.
   An uncle worked in the railroad office,
   Another uncle lived among compasses

   Salvaged from polar expeditions,
   Another uncle danced and died.
   The family had so many branches

   That you could move all over the world,
   Set down on a closed lake
   Or follow cargo along a mountain base

   Or surface at the Paris Opera during That's
   With a letter for the Prussian consul
   Without ever stepping outside.

   There were so many changes of season.
   Glove by glove the new clothes came and went,
   Remembered only because a photograph had been taken.

   There were so many policemen
   Blocking traffic above the park,
   On the hot days when the downtown workers

   Needed to be shown where to walk.
   Nothing would ever end.
   The Nile would flow from its unknowable source.

   Among the butterflies and songbirds
   That came back each April
   Catullus would whisper to schoolboys

   His reassuring obscenities.
   There were marks on things.
   The way the old slash wore smooth

   Showed how deep and how long ago
   The blade hit. On the wedding day
   There was a parade of sabers.

   The guests waited until the light went away
   And the room was a night beach awash with loose eyes
   Before they allowed the piano music to unmoor them.

Geoffrey O'Brien's poetry has been published in A Book of Maps, The Hudson Mystery, and Floating City: Selected Poems 1978-1985. His many prose works include Hardboiled America, Dream Time, The Phantom Empire, and Castaways of the Image Planet. He is editor-in-chief of The Library of America and lives in New York City.