Four Hours Before “I Do”

Bad habits persist:
The nail biting, the bickering.

Beside the sand trap
like a bull fighter’s cape . . .

A person can take just so much sad news
or guilt: that teenage Arab boy, his mouth
forced into a funnel for gas and set ablaze;

Like waves on the mediterranean your little shrieks roll ahead of your feet, watched over by foreign pine trees, and when you chase them, like doves they take off to the blue skies of my father’s youth. Your little eyes and ears clamber up my story line; fascination sits on your eyebrows like a wild