The Name of the Island Was Marriage

The Name of the Island Was Marriage

Bruce Beasley

I

 The name of the island was Island and the name of the Friday 

 was Good. Sunflower roots lay smoked on a bed of moss 

over sea-flattened stones and sealed in a cedar box, like a tiny 

 coffin on the china: the unpent 

smoke outpuffed its alderwood burn on our cheeks. 

 The constituents of a thirty-year marriage 

lay before us, like a mis-en-place: 

 ingredients of pleasure, local 

and strange. We assembled them as if we had never 

 used them before, like the raw 

deer hearts strewn with wildflowers, pearls 

 of herring roe scooped up on branches of hemlock. 

 Stinging nettles, sweet, long-roasted: where, 

 where now was their sting? 

II

 To name an island for the very idea 

of an island: its insularity, its 

nonnegotiable unfluidity. 

 All pent in by what it is not -- 

the restless aqueous -- so its name 

 insisted it was what it was. 

The name of the marriage had come to be Angry Teen. 

 The name of the marriage had come to be Did We Fuck Up. 

Skunk cabbage burst all over from the roadside murk, 

 more xanthic than sunflowers or than noon sun, more 

skunk-scent-insistent than skunks. The decedents 

 of the earliest settlers, said the brochure's typo, still live on the island today. 

 So the dead walk here, all 

 pent in by what they are not. 

III

 The island was Island Island. The god 

 was I AM WHO I AM. As 

in the beginning He made each thing, it seemed 

 to startle Him to realize 

it was good, as if good 

 were something else He gave birth by merely 

having it in His mind. 

 Glimmers of saltwater poured off the clay and marl 

and dry was born. Island lay isolate, not-wet 

 in the wet. Is land was born. 

We smoothed and refrosted the marred 

 crust of what we'd made, and 

 the idea of marriage was reborn, the idea 

 of marring unborn. 

IV

 The chef came to our room to fix the unstoppable furnace. 

 He smelled of sorrel and roasted oysters and sage as he knelt 

to fiddle with the gas-blast. Dolce far niente painted on the wall. 

 The sweet accomplishment of nothing. 

Only when God began to do, after untimeable stasis, 

 did He find out how good 

His pouring-apart of opposites -- sunrip and earth, up-

 tick of skunk cabbage and its stench, and 

sunflower root and the dark box it huddled in -- might be. 

 Let us divide decedents 

from descendent, motherfather from son. Somewhere, even here, a furious 

 angel struggles in air to aim his chalice 

exactly to catch each blood-spurt off the cross. 

 It must be saved. In three days the decedent will live 

again and want back His blood. The island's name 

 in some no-longer translatable tongue was said 

to be Island, as if island 

 were all that an island could be. The name of the marriage, as if 

we made it, by calling it, so 

 was said -- behold, it startles us still -- to be good.