Elegy for a Phantom Bride
-- after Elegy, Natasha Trethewey
Nuit d'hymenee!
O douce nuit d'amour!
La destine
M'enchaine a toi sans retour.
Romeo et Juliette, Charles Gounod
That night the air was cloyed with mosquitoes,
their heady sanguine rendezvous to make more
of their kind among the wealth of living things
out in the cooling pastures. Early June, when
it occurred to me I might make do with her
wedding dress, post-war Santa Fe couture:
unadorned chiffon waterfall over French taffeta.
The next morning I found it in the steamer trunk
in the study, nestled in slightly yellowed tissue
paper, as if the sun had stolen in to scent and
tint what she had worn, boring through chipped
and sprung brass locks. I stood in the mirror
in the rippling shadows, spectral, young, more
like a bel canto Lucia descending the stairs in
the euphoria of madness than a bride happy,
happy; I was not, you see, and I could not tell
him, no words rose to my tongue, not even
when we drank our summer margaritas looking
out over the snow-capped mountains—I could
not say to myself that I didn't love him, was only
afraid to go on alone, my mother's death aching
within me like an inflamed seam of tangerine
light marrying foothills and sky. Two weeks
later, just as if I were moving in water, chiffon
billowing around me, Mother's vestal ghost
carrying my train, we stood near potted orange
trees while the county judge said his piece.
We clung to each other and I promised myself
I could graft my heart to his ebullience. Does it
matter now it never happened, that our wedding
night recedes as if it were someone else's, caught
in a gold-leaf frame like a Victorian liaison
between two stoics for the sake of a bloodline?
In that Renoir in my mind, the allusion to bliss
only, intimated by the linens' rumpling, nude's
pale back to her painter, groom's notable absence,
the late spring burning in the long window—
nothing less and nothing more.
(from Blackbirds Dance in the Empire of Love, 2013)
