Sharon Olds - To My Husband lyrics

At their wedding service, outdoors, the young bridesmaids' dresses midnight-eggplant, grosgrain satin shot with glints of maroon like pheasant harvested, painted, and eaten, the minister read Paul's letter to the Corinthians, describing you. After the service your high-school sweetheart talked about you, your steadfastness, your kindness. She met you a month after your mother had died on a distant island, and every Friday and Saturday night you went dancing, the only teenagers on some wooden floor in some club, holding each other, turning, 1958, 1959 . . . Then, I understood – if it had been half a generation later you would have been lovers, you would have been married, and it seems to me I might be dead by now, dead long since, not married, or married badly, never had children or written any words. I'd have died on West 12th Street, that time, making a bomb – badly – they would have identified me by my little finger, my mother sitting in the precinct, holding my co*ked pinky.