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Make It Old: A Wedding Anniversary Epithalamion

Make It Old: A Wedding Anniversary Epithalamion

Last updated on: April 29, 2015 at 5:44 pm by Richard Chess

Make It Old: A Wedding Anniversary Epithalamion 2015-04-29T17:44:08-07:00 Richard Chess

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In the beginning was a wedding. The ceremony began with light. The ceremony included the separation of water from water, and it included the formation of land followed by the breaking apart of continents. The sound was terrible, and it was heard beyond the sky and in the perfect garden, the expensive venue chosen for the wedding ceremony and reception.

The ceremony began before there was a brain, a human brain, before there were two human brains, even before there was a serpent brain. But there was an alphabet, and there was intelligence, and intelligence arranged the letters to form a world.

(Even now, some nights you can see, in the bride’s eye, in the subtle shading of her cheek, signs that deep inside her letters are moving, meeting each other, touching, deciding to marry or drift apart: m-a-r-r-i-a-g-e, m-i-r-a-g-e, r-a-g-e, a-g-e . . .)

Crawling and swarming, the guests arrived in search of their names. The guests circled in water; the guests were leaves of trees that turned into wings of songbirds and birds of prey.

After every goodness, just before the creation of rest, they arrived, the penultimate act of creation: groom, bride.

Thus, the ceremony was designed.

God made it that way. God, whose DNA was all over the linen light and in the water, in fruit and grasses, so that a forensic detective, later, would have no trouble identifying the judge who sentenced groom and bride first to imprisonment in unlikely Eden, then tossed them, with hardly enough clothing to cover them and not a dime in their pockets, into the unforgiving world. Henceforth, every woman and man, clinging to each other, is to trudge away from Eden.

But created of Eden’s soil and bone, what did they know about it, marriage, the first bride and groom? They didn’t know until they knew. They didn’t know anything; then they discovered blame. He blamed her. She blamed it. And who did God blame? Did God blame God’s self for ignoring the counsel of angels who advised against creating woman and man?

Blame: a natural enough place for a true marriage to begin.

Deep in the night before your wedding, a howl frightened you. It has its own door, the animal, a rubber flap that swings open and slaps shut after the dog steps through. The animal goes and comes as it pleases. Heading into the woods beyond its house. Bears in those woods, coyotes.

The night before the wedding, a howl wrenched you, you and your beloved, from bed, but it was too dark to enter the woods, and maybe it was pointless, the pet already dead, so what could you do? Terrified, you pulled up two chairs and, facing each other, you and your beloved, you began to sing, because the book said that was a tradition, The Song of Songs to each other.

Oh, give me of the kisses of your mouth,
For your love is more delightful than wine.
Your ointments yield a sweet fragrance,
Your name is like finest oil—
Therefore maidens love you.
Draw me after you, let us run!

(Is the dog alive?)

You have captured my heart,
My own, my bride,
You have captured my heart
With one glance of your eyes,
With one coil of your necklace.
How sweet is your love,
My own, my bride!
How much more delightful than wine,
Your ointments more fragrant
Than any spice!

The Song of Songs: the first bride, the first groom, for them it was a song without words, without a tune, without singers, the song of love that was created before male and female were crafted, before life into them was blown.

Because you are contrary, because you came to life and lost your hair too soon in the Age of Aquarius, you refused the laws of secularism, assimilation, and embraced the manual of tradition, The New Jewish Wedding Book, a book for a generation of Jews whose motto is make it old.

Thus, the kittel, the wedding gown/burial shroud you donned; thus the ketubah, the signing, in the presence of witnesses, the marriage contract; thus the bedeken, the veiling by the groom of the bride; thus the huppah, the wedding canopy, and the sheva brachot, seven blessings, and yihud, the moments of privacy, immediately following the ceremony, a guard outside the door, for the newlyweds to sip each other’s wine; thus the badhen, the jester at the reception. And for your guests, whose lives are Macys, Moog synthesizers, McDonalds; and for your guests, citizens of United Secular America: a program to explain the strange performance.

You and your bride, born into the long shadow of Eden, born into love sung by ancestors, born into the sound of tumbling Temple stones translated into broken glass echoing all the way from 70 CE Jerusalem to 1933 Berlin, from early twentieth century New York to late twentieth century Asheville.

You added the sound of your own shattered glass to the soundtrack of your people.

Breaking the glass: a moment followed by a kiss, a cheer, a song: siman tov u’mazal tov, good sign and good luck.

Breaking the self, your precious, single self*,* reinforced and defended for decades (you married at 36): the work of marriage.

Twenty-five years now. A beautiful bride, a strong, wise wife, and the shards to show for love, for life.

Richard Chess is the author of three books of poetry, Tekiah, Chair in the Desert, and Third Temple. Poems of his have appeared in Telling and Remembering: A Century of American Jewish Poetry, Bearing the Mystery: Twenty Years of IMAGE, and Best Spiritual Writing 2005. He is the Roy Carroll Professor of Honors Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. He is also the director of UNC Asheville’s Center for Jewish Studies.

Photo above is credited to Hideyuki Kamon and used under a Creative Commons license.

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