Two and One – a wedding meditation for C & D

As requested by the bride … below is a poem written for C & D’s wedding (2/20/10):

Two and One

He wants to go out,

She wants to stay in:

His, the exploration, the far landscape,

Loping stride taking hills by the meter,

Lazy rays arcing who-knows-where-ward;

Hers, the excavation, the interior weave,

Parsing warp and woof, feeling and thought,

To know quite clearly the Weaver’s design.

Open-ended closure or close-ended opener:

How shall the two become one?

Harley, or Haiku? Or, or And?

(And above all, dear, what do you want?)

 

En parentheses:

Thunder Road beckons me now;

I must write this down.

 

If desires are promises from God,

Then still my beating heart,

Else answer me now, O Thou,

Thou giver of the heart, and heart’s desire.

* * *

Enter Vietnam, a most exotic place

For the two to (be)come:

History recent and history distant,

Wars fought and wars lost;

And then, almost by surprise, time for a new beginning:

And the orphan finds a family,

And the traveler finds a home.

* * *

After this, the real challenge,

This howness of this twoness becoming a oneness

Whose oneness yet grows, and does not shrink, each one of the two.

“I feel,” she said, “like I have to fight for my differentiation;

For you it sounds like a walk in a meadow.”

“But what I really want is to know what you want:

I will know what to do with that.”

Silent, he wonders how to play the violin.

* * *

There are two places where the two do meet,

Where the twoness is the oneness

And the oneness the twoness;

(“And the two shall become one flesh…

And they were not ashamed.”)

One place is a beginning, and the other is a goal:

The place of beginning, a class in creative writing,

Of conceiving and weaving a story, living,

And no longer one story only, or even two, but many—

The inner-woven is now the interwoven

(And yes, as Snoopy wrote, “The plot thickens”).

The other place is a goal, and that goal is Peace:

Harmony’s fruit by faith and love, where adventure is neither missed

Nor mis-adventure, because it is not ventured alone;

And what is ventured between is of equal or greater worth

To what is ventured without, or out-and-about;

And where the inner gaze, no longer a solo gaze,

Is neither horrified nor trapped in pits of subjectivity,

But sees both beauty and truth, and gratefully weeps,

Not only for what is seen, but for the knowledge that

Another has seen clearly, and has not turned away.

 

If the place of beginning is a class,

Then preliminary assignments are done,

The character sketches, the research (both topical and historical),

Proposals considered, revised and accepted:

This, now, is the term project, the full-length story, co-authored,

Where each voice, singularly expressed, writes one story,

And now with no question of Authorial intent:

Righteousness, Peace and Joy in the Sprit-who-is-the-Dance

(“And where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom”),

The Three-and-One’s gift of love

To the two, now two-and-one.