Seed Across Snow

To the Outdoor Wedding

22 To the Outdoor Wedding all come, forgive, and bless the dogmatic over-ripe bride who insists she will be married in the garden of her dead mother, though the guests and wedding party hiss and shiver as the light rain turns unrepentantly to pelting ice. all rise, and love the narrow bridesmaids, numb and under-dressed in lavender slivers of spaghetti strap, and listen to their teeth chatter as they scurry down the aisle, drawn to the collective body heat of the groomsmen and minister shifting from foot to foot under the wavering trellis of altar. Praise the wind picking up mightily, and the groom, unsteady and sallow, who does not beam when she appears in blown splendor on her father’s arm—and the guests who are wet-faced, their heads bowed down to keep the sleet from stinging. It is the bride, prayerful and confident in her white faith, we have to thank when a gust picks up and wraps her long veil three times around her father’s head, shrouding him from the booming garden tent about to unpluck itself from the soggy ground. who else but her to be thankful to when instead of the tent, her veil snaps free from the father’s flailing and lifts high, then thrashes away over the Kentucky cornfields, just now 23 brilliant in their new spring greening—the green shine, the sumptuous periwinkle sky, the brilliant white strata folding into itself, and dropping its knot—but wait! again the wind sends it sailing and the guests, heads up now, mouths open in collected prayer of ah and ah as the veil transforms into a bucking chinese dragon, taking away all that is old, folding, dancing off and far. The guests gather themselves and offer the warm utterance ooh when from the thawing and newly planted fields a thousand black starlings lift in alarm. ...