readings

(warning: photo bears no relation to post, but I'm still thinking about the U.P. and can't help but sharing a bit more of it)

J and I felt pretty strongly that our ceremony should be a reflection of us. I’m sure that most couples start out with this desire, but it’s easy to see why, in practice, the ceremony often becomes something else entirely. There are always competing interests to please—or at least satisfy—and personal desire can begin to seem, at least relatively, almost selfish. J and I faced interreligious challenges and opportunities, but as neither of us has what I might call an active religious life, we hoped to created a secular ceremony that conveyed some gravitas. We wanted a bit of heft without religious signifiers, and as it turns out, it’s not so easy to do. I should say that I also have a knee-jerk aversion to sappy or saccharine exclamations of love and its saving power. I also didn’t want anything in the ceremony that suggested merging or becoming one in some transcendental love sphere.

The readings, then, were an important part of our ceremony. We’re blessed to have friends that are writers and poets, discerning and particular in their tastes. They’re gifted readers and managed to make their readings electric in the mid-summer air. I imagine that I'll remember J's friend Eric's perfectly dry--and also stunningly engaged--reading of the Frank O'Hara's poem long after I forget everything else. I include them here because I loved them so much and because they seemed like blessed—though secular—gifts from people who have shaped our individual lives and who helped us make our way to the point of marriage.

#1
It is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive
holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own
way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all
costs to be so and against all opposition.

To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to
love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the
ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work
is but preparation.

Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over and
uniting with another (for what would a union be of something
unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate?), it is a high
inducement to the individual to ripen, to become world, to become
world for himself for another’s sake. It is a great exacting claim
upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast
distances.

– Rainer Maria Rilke

#2
Having a Coke with You
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse

it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it

– Frank O’Hara


#3
Is it for now or for always,
The world hangs on a stalk?
Is it a trick or a trysting-place,
The woods we have found to walk?

Is it a mirage or miracle,
Your lips that lift at mine:
And the suns like a juggler’s juggling-balls,
Are they a sham or a sign?

Shine out, my sudden angel,
Break fear with breast and brow,
I take you now and for always,
For always is always now.

– Philip Larkin