JOSHUA GOTTLIEB-MILLER

Epithalamion

On his wedding night, the groom
wakes up screaming.
Charley horse, his wife tells him

in the morning, when a dull pain
from his leg leads out of his body.
He doesn’t remember screaming.

Piling their luggage in the car
he does not fall into himself.
He does not look down. In the dream

he does not have before he wakes
his wife in the night, the trees
a kind of chuppah as the leaves change

color with the seasons while the rabbi
wraps the young couple in his tallit.
The groom does not look anyone

in the eye; he feels like a glass eye
that has finally found its socket.
If she held him in her hand

and then saw through him—
if a hole in the world
closed up, if a glass eye saw.

If she circled him three times,
he would never take off
his ring, which is no symbol.

A pain in his leg
that by the afternoon
is almost gone.