DAY OF THE WEDDING
195
They give me some tea later asking only a few discreet ques–
t1ions, and afterwards I leave for the
city.
The rain has let up. I
drive through , this country that I know so well, along the sea with
tears pouring over my face dripping from my cheeks onto my lap.
The black marshes and the sea roaring with storm breakers dis–
appear behind me, the houses with their steady, unchanging lights,
intruding into the landscape, and I remember that as she had
moved up the aisle I had seen her long pointed legs, the yellow fuzz
over all glowing irridescently, the round eyes filled with thousands
of ommitidia, the waving feelers daintily working, her long seg–
mented abdomen gold and black. I've seen them in summers past,
sting prostrate bodies, their wings vibrating into a blur.
I catch up to a car winding along the black road and pass it
on a straight stretch, my lights jumping up and down on the trees
as my car bumps in the ruts of the road, and then enter into an
open area of fields. The night is coming in clear and cold, the moon
appears among the scattered clouds, then disappears illuminating
their edges.
I have seen that moon before, reflecting itself off tiny waves,
where rivers of light and black grass stretched for miles before us,
and we could smell the sea air and hear the noise of the surf. I had
been a guest for a summer weekend and had been lying on the warm
grass beside the tennis courts with my head in my arms listening to
the noises people make when they play tennis, when you were intro–
duced to me. I climbed to my feet brushing off the grass to shake
hands and that night you took me out onto the river to tell me
stories and make me laugh, disturbing the roosting herons who flew
silently away and you dipped the oars into the water and the ducks
rose up from under the bow beating their wings against the water.
I had thought that the days afterwards were days of endless 'time
and of eyes that were no longer just organs of sight but organs that
gave, light flowing out of them, a warm light, yellow sunlight that
lifted, lightened each thing, that took a room and touched
it
into
flame, taking it out of its atomic sense and bursting it into joy and
the people in it disturbed into other worlds; touched at their very
core, their own tiny flame springing up as the oxygen poured over
it. But it wasn't so easy and the fields around me hide the meadow
mice who crouch in their runs and burrows. When they squeak as
