19 October 2006 | Vol. 6, No. 3
A Bit of Marriage
Clock strikes noon.
Sweat piles her hair together
giving it a sticky gleam.
Her diamond drops glitter
their own way.
That small-faced man and that swell-faced woman. Those yellow daffodils
placed soberly on the white sheet.
They bend their bodies
they shut their eyes
a restlessness passes her abdomen
and they are man and woman.
He thought with some precision
that marriages may be made elsewhere
but done here
sometimes
in some unsolicited places.
Look at this singing sensation
the man wrought the words so well
and she sang
and here he was in a bit of chapel.
With a sigh they sign
a blissful accord
over the cream roses
pinned in the corners of the table
to keep its cloth from slipping down.
Peering eyes of doll-like girls
shut in sacred ardor
of final celebration.
Through the shuttered public gate
another girl with missing tooth
made a big bubble.
About the author:
Arun Gaur lives in Panchkula, Haryana, India, and has been teaching English at Chandigarh since 1982. Arun has published one critical book, I Stand Apart: Alienated Center in Walt Whitman's 'Song of Myself', and three collections of poetry, The Neurosis Island: Homofuge!, Steppe Tramping with Gorky, and Woodcutters. He is currently working on a series of poems on Mizoram for his anthology, Mizoram-2004, based on thousands of photographs taken there. Some of these poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in Ariga, Poetry Magazine, Orbis, Ygdrasil, Eclectica, and Poery Salzburg Review.
For further reading:
See the complete list of work by Arun Gaur at 42opus. Browse the contents of 42opus Vol. 6, No. 3, where "A Bit of Marriage" ran on October 19, 2006. List other work with these same labels: poetry.
