FreeVerse: Poems About Marriage

Hosted by Cara over at Ooh Books

Last week, one of the poems I shared was a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning that my parents had read at their wedding. This week, I was going to share the poems that Mr. Jenners and I had read at our wedding, but I couldn't find them easily. (I'll find them soon, I promise.) But, in the course of rummaging through all types of papers, I found two poems about marriage that had caught my eye years ago (before I was married). Both the poems made an impression on me, and I thought I would share them with you today. Interestingly enough, both use building and construction imagery in them.

Love Song: I and Thou
by Alan Dugan

Nothing is plumb, level or square:
the studs are bowed, the joists
are shaky by nature, no piece fits
any other piece without a gap
or pinch, and bent nails
dance all over the surfacing
like maggots. By Christ
I am no carpenter. I built
the roof for myself, the walls
for myself, the floors
for myself, and got
hung up in it myself. I
danced with a purple thumb
at this house-warming, drunk
with my prime whiskey: rage.
Oh I spat rage's nails
into the frame-up of my work:
it held. It settled plumb,
level, solid, square and true
for that great moment. Then
it screamed and went on through
skewing as wrong the other way.
God damned it. This is hell,
but I planed it, I sawed it,
I nailed it, and I
will live in it until it kills me.
I can nail my left palm
to the left-hand cross piece but
I can't do everything myself.
I need a hand to nail the right
a help, a love, a you, a wife.

Men Marry What They Need. I Marry You.
by John Ciardi

Men marry what they need. I marry you.
morning by morning, day by day, night by night,
and every marriage makes this marriage new.

In the broken name of heaven, in the light
that shatters granite, by the spitting shore,
in air that leaps and wobbles like a kite,

I marry you from time and a great door
is shut and stays shut against wind, sea, stone,
sunburst, and heavenfall. And home once more

inside our walls of skin and struts of bone,
man-woman, woman-man, and each the other,
I marry you by all dark and all dawn

and lean to let time spend. Why should I bother
the flies about me? Let them buzz and do.
Men marry their queen, their daughter, or their mother

by names they prove, but that thin buzz whines through:
when reason falls to reasons, cause is true.
Men marry what they need. I marry you.