A Brooklyn Wedding.(five poems)(Poem) - The American Poetry Review

 I married Death at the Kings County courthouse. A clerk stared past us, eyes dim with Seconal, sheen of catsup on his tie, and mumbled, Turn inform one-eleven. Produce the rings.  A few waiting couples, Ukrainian or Byelorussian, already argued, caught in their impenetrable language. A rouged nun with bamboo hoop earrings, perhaps just a spectator, sobbed avidly, her lower lip trembling; a high clock shuffled in bursts from minute to minute; unseen kids shrieked. It was snowing at the exit. We hailed a few cabs, but they were headed for the foggy Verrazano. I told Death, let me handle this , but alone I did no better. Night fell. We caught the R train and the ride home seemed longer than ever, the returning clerks more silent, ramparted behind sports pages black with victory, victory. We surfaced at Atherel Place, marginal neighborhood between Canarsie and Bath Beach, known for a brick works now boarded up, a baptismal chapel, a pencil factory. Death let me in. He owned that sliver of a house-- formica counter, industrial carpet, acoustic tiles trimmed with a box cutter--and we fumbled at zippers. We mimicked our ardent shadows. When we woke distant sirens whined--what bombing? whose suicide?-- then the granitic scraping of plough blades. Death rolled to the wall. In that preternatural clarity I admired a hairy mole at the nape of his neck and I wept for him, scrunched like me under silence, his belly rounding and softening, his future a block walk with a mad-eyed Pekinese more interested in scone wrappers than a scratch behind the ears, he who was once invincible, lord of cities, now married to the powdery moths growing transparent behind the cinched blinds.  

D. NURKSE is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently The Border Kingdom (Knopf, 2008). He received a 2009 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.