Newly Married
–David Whyte
Awake at midnight
in the darkened
house,
I look up
at the full, bright
white circle
of the moon
and walk aglow
in the pale light,
the frost outside
a perfect reflected
snow of whiteness
edging
my lifted hands,
against the spreading
night, my pointed finger
following, through
a window pane,
a single glittering
star adrift
in a vault
of the black sky,
while around me
the moonlight
paints every single wall
a shade
of silvered white,
outlining
the dark, moving center
of the silhouette
I call a self.

In a life defined
by difficult
passages
I am that
rare tidal
hardly ever
experienced thing,
a walking
glowing, undefined
lamp of anticipatory
happiness, looking
over the roof tops
of an unsuspecting world,
a disturbing
effervescent unarticulated
someone who has
promised something
he has promised
to reflect on
and live through
and come to understand.

Beneath the covers
I hear her
silent breathing
like an unspoken
vow to the luminous
circle of all the seasons,
to the coming and going
of breath and memory,
to the spring before
we knew each other,
to the end of the moist
Irish summer
when we first had met,
and then to that
Italian October
still living in our cells,
when we walked
in Florence
among the
falling leaves.

One thing
I have learned.

How difficult
it is to die
from my disbelief
and kneel
down
to the truer
underlying
font of happiness
waiting to break
the enclosing surface,
to believe
in my body that
I deserve
the full spacious
sense of
not being
thirsty anymore,
of living
a present
contentment.

But this spacious
season,
this cold winter night,
following a mid-winter
wedding,
under the pale white
moon
or the frosted sun,
I am strangely
in the midst
of this happiness,
full of memories
of past happiness,
as if I could hold
each epoch
in my
hands again.

I am full
of clear forgiveness
to what clouded
that happiness
and I am careful
and alert to what
is needed to
keep our present
joy.

I am a groom
to the possibility
my vows expressed
and my hands
and my arms
and my speech
and my thoughts
are shaped
to the care
of that possibility.

She sleeps
and I walk
under the moon
close to her
breath and her body,
not wanting
to wake her,
wanting to wake
and reach for
her sleeping hand
under the covers
to feel that slowly
curling palm
in mine telling me
this happiness is
unutterably ancient,
living at a rested
eternal center
where I have allowed
myself
to come to ground,
and fall,
all at the same time,
which is after all
not only
a foundation
and a falling toward
the other,
but toward
a shared future
never experienced
before,
to become real
on both the inside
and the outside
in the company of another
and I realize
as I take her hand
under the moonlight,
that I have been
newly
married all my life,
courting the
morning
hours since
childhood,
down on my knees
to the possibilities
of the day,
alert, in the ferry line
off the island,
to every
pilgrim possibility
of travel,
committed fully
to the next view
along the road,
to the beckoning
horizon
of everything
that appears
and disappears,
like the
miracle touch
of this palm in mine,
so physical,
so real,
this frosted
silver
evanescent night
amidst
all the
grievous
vanishing.

I want to open
the doors
to the garden
and stride out
into the quiet
neighborhood,
knocking on doors
and waking everyone
from their own quiet
romance with sleep,
shouting,
I am a man
in
love with
possibility,
and most
especially,
most intimately
most surprisingly,
as they stand
there in their
pyjamed
surprised,
wondering
at their
previously sane
neighbor
now pointing
at the
frosted upstairs
windows
of our nearby house,
with that one particular
form of possibility
sleeping so quietly,
so unsuspectingly,
so companionably,
so warmly
beneath
the moonlit sheets.