For the wedding: Not mine, never mine, but here I am, laid out to please, legs crossed, palms closed, never far from those dark vows that echo love, sing love, shout love! down aisles or centuries. It is not my wont.

You will find me as I slip sweet nothings to the groom's youngest brother; let his mother find him now as he swaggers under words planned out in gold; watch me duck him as he staggers: I am headlong out of love.

To the buffet—its salmon laid out pink to tempt, a permanence of pleasing, while overhead the hats of semi-agéd women bob, festooning the air with overheard etiquettes of royalty and church, as though over-ripe anxieties won't burst behind their smiles.

O air—yes, let us breathe this field instead, or that woodland promise, all pine and honor, those beach or harbor-side I do's: so different (from the last). No vestibules here for those queueing grooms' brothers (let us pray), brand new in-laws lined up post-dance. No, this time, let us breathe only outlaws, their crinkle-cut eyes throwing gravitas at my feet.

I've seen them all, dodged them or danced slow solos to that couple or this, my dear lost friends sleeping evermore to their grooms' hairy adagios.

But now dawn licenses my exit: I flee another night that shan't be, can't be, won't be mine. For now those brothers snooze, laid out by booze and trying. They'll circle back to graze the next, and there I'll be: palms crossed, legs closed, echoing nuance in a permanence of want.

.