AFTER THE WEDDING (Tentative)

After the wedding party and champagne 
toasts to undying love and the magic
of finding someone to share this life with,
our indiscriminate yet ruffled philosopher 
stumbles out of the country club into 
the evening, it's getting dark, the sun has set 
as he walks out on the golf course, into 
the deep rough grass and under the stately 
oaks and maple and beeches, the grounds 
festooned with lilac perfume and sweet 
honeysuckle, rarefied air ripe for thinking 
as he glides over the manicured greens. 
He is not alone. There are deer, of course, 
in the shadows, chewing on leaves, woodchucks 
grazing in the dusk, great horned owls, and cardinals 
singing vespers. What is our friend, our thinker, 
ruminating on? The problem of being? 
The metaphysics of love? The phenomenology of human 
experience, his life, this elegant meditation 
in solitude? No. He's thinking. He's thinking that  -- 
if we can know anything at all of this man 
walking in his ruffled suit and ruffled tie -- 
he's thinking of relationships, how the subject 
always means nothing without the predicate 
and the predicate signifies nothing save 
to carry the nominative lifelessly along, 
no, he's thinking of the endless stretch of 
being and thought, the interminable 
resistance to knowing anything worth knowing,
and laughing at that, and truth be told, his 
thinking returns to relationships because 
it must after all return to something, now 
under this dark beech, his parents, how they 
sleep in their graves in another country, 
forgotten and unforgiven, refugees from 
this life of anguish, how his brother's ashes 
now scattered across the Mississippi 
seem to haunt this golf course like some furtive 
opossum, how his ex-wife Hannah so many years 
removed from that night on the ferry when 
she said he'd thought of nothing but his own 
private thoughts, that he couldn't feel or make 
sense of a simple thing like love as he was 
so afraid and it wasn't until he walked 
onto the dark wet grass of the eighteenth hole 
under the magnificent oak that spread 
its wizened limbs like some minister delivering 
a benediction that the something suddenly 
arose, an uncomfortable feeling, an unease, 
something unkempt and disordered, like the 
wisteria tendrils raveling and unraveling 
nearby in this lush and manicured world, it was, 
he knew, or thought he knew, something well, unknowable, 
unframeable, something that could not be 
parsed in the mind's grammar or a Socratic 
question, it was something else flooding his 
being, a coldness, a chill, an inarticulate 
awareness, a discomfort with no logical 
origin, it was a trembling, there, in 
the golf course, of all places, it was 
something like the trembling tickle of lilac 
blossoms on his lips, the delight of that, 
the sweetness not of memory or beauty 
or heartache but an emptiness, the chill 
of the evening and the stumbling skunk 
approaching, how his life would never 
be the same.