Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds


Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. I don't have a barn poem, but here's an old one that I've sent out multiple times, and rewritten quite a lot. I decided recently to turn it into a sonnet (as it's an homage to a Shakespeare sonnet, or started out that way), but it just won't work. I am retiring it from my send-out book. I hope you enjoy it.

Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds

“Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments.”
– Shakespeare, Sonnet 116

If true marriage must have impediments,
then let us admit them. Let us climb up
our impediments, like step stools
one pushes to a bathroom sink for a child

brushing her teeth. Let us make
scaffolds out of our impediments, and scurry
over the top, like soldiers rushing a castle.
Doesn’t marriage, even of the truest minds,

require climbing? Marriage waits for us
in a room above marriage, a room where bodies
are discarded, or lifted up. Above, above--
let that be our theme. Marriage isn't simple,

not a bee in a flower, stamen clutched within petals.
True minds in marriage aren’t true as in “honest.”
Imagine them true the way a beam, invisible
beneath a roof is true. They hold.

Signet Classic edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets


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