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Author's Commentary The Bride Examines Her Inheritance The Bride Fires Her NaivetÈ The Bride Loses Her Father The Bride's Lament After the Argument Why the Bride is Always Pure Shotgun The Bride Attains Her Stride The Bride Examines Her Inheritance The Bride Fires Her NaivetÈ The Bride Loses Her Father The Bride's Lament After the Argument Why the Bride is Always Pure Shotgun The Bride Attains Her Stride The Bride Examines Her Inheritance The Bride Fires Her NaivetÈ The Bride Loses Her Father The Bride's Lament After the Argument Why the Bride is Always Pure Shotgun The Bride Attains Her Stride The Bride Examines Her Inheritance The Bride Fires Her NaivetÈ The Bride Loses Her Father The Bride's Lament After the Argument Why the Bride is Always Pure Shotgun The Bride Attains Her Stride | Cecelia Hagen The Bride Examines Her Inheritance This was the house his parents started out in. They knew the same low ceilings and short conversations, they fingered the history of every chip on this table at which we now take our meals. I'm learning to listen to the morning shave, to bear the scrutiny of his cats and buddies. Today I nailed the poultry shears over the sink and considered the skins of chickens. I fried the phone cord on the front burner when my conversation exceeded its range. On the small of my back there's a rug burn the size of a dime from our latest attempt to outwit the meager frictions of our bed. So soon we're desperate for diversion, those casual feats of prestidigitation we used to pass up on street corners, the roving ace with a mind of its own. We're riding in the back of his parents' car. "So tell me," his mother says, "How goes the battle?" I'm abstaining from small talk for a week, a sullen experiment. I wait for my husband to answer her over the Buick's upholstery. After an awkward pause she mutters, "It's just an expression, you know." We squirm, fighting with fists deep in our pockets, miming a poverty of gesture, digging into a wealth of doubt. The Bride Fires Her NaivetÈ Was this what I longed for -- a paper plate studded with bows and a pelting with short-grain rice at the height of my day in the sun? Everyone turns toward me and sighs, thinking how their subscriptions have run out. For this privilege, mine will also expire. That pillow of hope I slept my girlhood away on bears a ring up to his hands as its last act before becoming a curio. I've been the simplest one, the one in whom naivetÈ was chambered like a bullet, expectation being the trigger I've squeezed to the hilt and love the gun. I'm just beginning to look at the next target, the effect of that one random shot over my shoulder when I toss these white flowers away. The Bride Loses Her Father Lettuce under the canapÈs, what was always there, vanished. Her husband cycles around town, looks up and says her name; her silver plane makes the sky bluer. Ahead, her father's face is a pressed flower with a dark growth that goes on. She would have come sooner but her husband is cheeseburgers and baseball, his parents eat asparagus for lunch, reducing. She placed the tidy scoop of his Anglo- vanilla last name over the one her father, everything Mediterranean, held on his tongue so well. This is foreign to her, the family gone fragile, her mother diminishing under her fur. The sisters who popped corks at her wedding are talking clothes, casseroles, things of a size to be held in the hands. She had considered him excessive and loveable, someone she could leave behind, someone she could come back to. The Bride's Lament after the Argument Those things he yelled at me over the racket the lawnmower made: a hurricane was in his face, a fallen barometer in each mean speck the wind snatched out of our mouths. I left the rake sprawled on the grass as the sky grew green. From behind the screen door I watched bugs do their battle. They were armed with confusion, they were close to my nose, they were mostly moths. He walked down the street, too far from lights to be followed. Come home to the broom, the photo of celery I hung on the wall like a braid of dried flowers. If there's to be an upheaval I'll stand in the core of it, platoons of electrical appliances I never asked for brandishing small motors in your absence. We've got fifteen speeds on this blender, honey, we've only used four. The wicks on the scented candles are white and the lights just went. There's that negligee from your mother, those sheets with the Chinese flowers. We could wait for the storm to blow over, we could duel with bright knives in its eye. Why the Bride Is Always Pure She wouldn't bomb the chambers of judges who grant divorces, wouldn't confront the miserable with placards proclaiming the broken promises of their pasts. No matter how many cakes she slices, each one has its top layer tenderly wrapped and frozen. Other people may have been misfortunate -- her parents, her friends. Her sympathy for them is abundant, her comprehension growing in spite of the well-honed joy she gets from polishing her newly minted life. Shotgun Not shotgun bride, I. He climbed that ladder of his own volition, weaponless yearning shared equally between us. So goes the divorce: we sneak off to the courthouse without fanfare or rancor, dangling all those years we shared as if they were keys on a chain, keys whose cars have been junked. I stand pale before the documents lying there for me to sign. Why this gun in my ribs, why now? No honking horns for us, no message in shaving cream on the windshield or tin cans trailing. We arrived ringless and just-we-two; we depart bound forever as less than friends. The Bride Attains Her Stride The competition got harder while I was off the track, now the raunchy aphrodisiac powder slips through my willing limbs more quickly, doesn't live in my veins like it used to. What about that one, patient, in the wings? I go after the one in the spotlight, I go on by myself, tight jeans in the telephone booth, the bit in my teeth I love to fondle with my tongue. I can see I'll miss some sweet regard but I'm not wrong about what's right for me, swinging my hips as I walk along, away, my way opening up before me step by incautious step, yes. |
Author's Commentary
"The bride as a cultural figure has always struck me as comic, sad, and romantic--a natural subject for poems. It's all about hope and delusion, dream and reality, role-playing as a stab at making something ephemeral into a permanent fixture.
The bride poems--a suite!--are full of stories I've heard from women friends. Even though she's an amalgam, the bride is such a character in my mind that I can put her in many non-bride situations, such as her first communion, her funeral, at her gynecologist's, and her bride-like qualities carry through.
At a bridal shower, I overheard one girl, who was married, say to the bride-to-be, "I know it seems like it's not worth it to have a big wedding, but a year later when you look at the photos it will all be worthwhile."
I was nineteen, and decided then and there that if I ever got married, I would elope."
Cecelia Hagen was the Fiction Editor for the Northwest Review for many years. Her work has been published in Portlandia, Exquisite Corpse, Prairie Schooner, Poet & Critic, Puerto del Sol, and in the book, From Where We Speak, an anthology of Oregon poets. She was awarded a writer's fellowship from Oregon Literary Arts in 2001 and a residency at Caldera in 2002. She currently lives and works in Eugene as an editor for the Oregon University System.