On Matthew’s Wedding Somewhere on the Other Side of the World

David Colodney

 

 

I’m black and white, I’m an 8-track left over after a garage sale that couldn’t be sold

for a dime, I’m sitting at a desk writing on an old typer

with a sticky Q key, listening to an old Dylan record on vinyl,

thinking I haven’t heard from my buddy Matthew in weeks,

remembering he’s off getting married,

married in Thailand, 

wishing I could be there

 

 

the world marble-small for guys like him. We root for new couples,

we admire old ones, we mourn the couples in-between, stumbling

Novocain-numb thru life, trying to figure out if they’re sad or not on a therapist’s

couch or a bartender’s stool.

 

 

I’m lamenting my friend now in a country I couldn’t find on a map.

I’m drinking Sierra Nevada beers, the same kind he and Scott and I drank

last summer, talking about Kim Addonizio and Denis Johnson at 3 am,

in a room lit mostly by lamppost glow from the street outside.

 

 

I’m snapped out of reverie when my ex-wife calls.

 

 

I’m foundling ambivalent, these conversations always end in second guessing,

they loom fog heavy, me yellowing like an old photo

of Frank O’Hara, and like him,

 

 

I’m thinking about my failed relationships

just as Matt starts a new life in one. Maybe I should have gotten married

on foreign soil because marriage itself is such alien terrain.