Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our

Julia B. Levine
Riverside Wedding of the Recovering Addicts
Silver gleams from the bride’s lip,
and the groom tongues it away, tenderly, hungrily,
his hands cupping another man’s name
tattooed across her back.
Hard to believe weariness
unfolds from this kind of astonishment.
That flowering is an undertow.
Hard to believe we are not endless
beside the judgeless water.
Already summer’s appetite
picks clean spring’s bare shoulders.
Crows fly out of the fluttercloth,
low-throated, barking,
flocks of night herons
settling in.
Already the not-yet is bridge
and eventual river
and the newlyweds wade in,
heads bent to a hard rain of rice,
140 ◆ Crab Orchard Review