Album for a second anniversary

I

Make this Cana, the first miracle.
Photograph upon photograph
you move in a white dress, breathing all
our marriage into yourself like the simple air.
These images in a book
have caught your outline. It is in my flesh
your deep pulse raps and gambols—
in you that I live, and wake.

II

Seeing our child now, held against you,
my own face leaning over him,
I can bear thinking of that small death,
that cold Saturday in July.
(The long drive in black cars,
the tiny coffin on the seat beside us.)
I can bear thinking how we walked away
in a light wind with the grunt of earth and shovels
fading behind us.
We turned home, only two of us,
faces clamped around sorrow like a fist.

III

Two years I have lived with you.
I watch in your face now
a deepening kindness. In this last photograph
we do not even need to look at each other.

Come, sit beside me. Below our window
the road swings westward to the highway and the mountains,
and the cars howl by. On the opposite footpath
a man and a woman are lighting cigarettes.
I close the book. These walls speak of you
now in late Spring. We live by what we feel—
this dumb power, this indwelling Christ.

October 1967