#MIDDLEBURY
Poem for Vows
Matthew Zapruder
(for E. and G.)
Hello beautiful talented
dark semi-optimists of June,
from far off I send my hopes
Brooklyn is sunny, and the ghost
of Whitman who loved everyone
is there to see you say what
can never be said, something like
partly I promise my whole life
to try to figure out what it means
to stand facing you under a tree,
and partly no matter how angry
I get I will always remember
we met before we were born,
it was in a village, someone
had just cast a spell, it was
in the park, snow everywhere,
we were slipping and laughing,
at last we knew the green secret,
we were sea turtles swimming
a long time together without
needing to breathe, we were
two hungry owls silently
hunting night, our terrible claws,
I don’t want to sound like I know,
I’m just one who worries all night
about people in a lab watching
a storm in a glass terrarium
perform lethal ubiquity,
tiny black clouds make the final
ideogram above miniature lands
exactly resembling ours, what is
happening happens again,
they cannot stop it, they take off
their white coats, go outside,
look up and wonder, only we
who promise everything despite
everything can tell them
the solution, only we know.
About this poem
“To my surprise and (temporary) dismay, this poem I wrote for the wedding of two friends veered off into the pervasive anxiety of climate change. I was bummed out until I discovered I was on my way to making the argument that the beautifully hopeful act of eternally pledging oneself to another is, in some elusive, metonymic way, related to our collective salvation.” – Matthew Zapruder
About Matthew Zapruder
Matthew Zapruder is the author of “Sun Bear” (Copper Canyon Press, 2014). He teaches in the M.F.A. program at Saint Mary’s College and lives in Oakland, Calif.
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day@poets.org.
(c) 2016 Matthew Zapruder. Originally published in Poem-a-Day, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.
