Kingdom Animalia by Aracelis Girmay and a few notes on love
I think often of the ceremony that will unite Matteo and me in our life time journey together. In all the parts of my life these days, I find myself listening for songs and poems that might be used in that ceremony, might depict in ways I cannot what our love means. I'm reading Aracelis Girmay's Kingdom Animalia again. It's been several months. I came across the poem, La Boda del Mar y Arena, which reminds me of the intricacies of love, how partners should know every part of one another, even to the many curves of the ear. Aracelis is ever the poet of love. Ever, ever, ever the poet of loss. I cannot know how one holds so much of it within one body. How does one walk without floating, directed by wind and not one's own volition? And perhaps that is the truest love, knowing that change may come and going with, loving still and more and still.
Re-reading and reading again
I come to "Central City Senior Center, New Orleans", and I think, it would be good to return to NOLA. I haven't been since before the waters rose and fell, in the months before, when the air was hot and thick. I arrived by flight, got down to the city, took a trolley for a bit and wandered before I met my friend there. I remember the po' boys and the people. I remember the nearness of death, the reminder in cemetery marble; I remember the celebrations of life down to the dregs in a glass. I remember my slick limbs dancing wild and Rebirth Brass Band pumping their bass and brass through my near-shattering bones, how the music tore and calcified, too. And I think of the magic of that place. Matteo and I will go to Rio for our honeymoon, but many months after the actual wedding, and I wonder if we might manage a trip to New Orleans for a weekend and another to Portland as he has really wanted to go there. Or perhaps one day, we will just go, not necessarily in the year of our union, and claim New Orleans as a site of honey and moons; maybe we will do this with many places in the world. Shouldn't a marriage have such bounty, where a bit of travel or even staying home to garden and watch movies together is a delight of stars and sweetness?