Epithalamion in Celebration of the Marriage of Nick and Nancy

by Tertia (nom de poésie of Laura Michaelis)

Inspired by the Upstart Crow, Jack Kerouac and Charles Fillmore

The marriage of true minds admits no impediment
And doggerel’s much reviled
But the muses deserted this celebrant
before the syntax was compiled.
Love’s not time’s fool, the bard assures us
and love’s not necromancy;
but there’s little time for fuss today;
I need a shtick for Robotnik and Nancy.
When poets attempt to honor a union,
they’re likely to offer unseemly profusions
of ovine and sylvan and mythic allusion.
But tropes of this nature must seem antisocial
for the couple who staged the metaproposal.
So I will retreat from romantic conceit and meditate some on an annular one.
(A conclusion foregone for the pride of Canton.)
In the meantime I’ll offer a glutinous pun:
Love is the leavening that lightens our lives
and when these two married it doubled in size.
When these two minds go head to head
I think of some things that Kerouac said
about the road companions he sought—
the ones mad to live and mad to talk,
who never yawn or tell commonplace lies
who burn, burn burn like Roman candles in the skies.
But these two minds are manifestly corporeal
Their union embodied in a world arboreal
If this be error or passing fancy, I never writ.
Nor Nick loved.
Nor Nancy.