Epithalamium After 50 Years Poem by julia kolchinsky dasbach

"A year of marriage counts as three" - Soviet proverb

Behind us, the Caribbean surf thrums, palm trees clap
their fronds against its wake to dull the edge of familial conversation.

My grandfather raises his shaking glass: To the way you love your husband!
He swallows mouthful after mouthful and motions all of us to drink.

His tastes have changed from vodka to cognac to red Chilean wine
he gulps as though this drink could be his last. In 1962, after three tries

he made it clear: I'll never ask again. So grandmother said yes
because he wouldn't drink or fight or cheat or raise his voice.

She liked his quiet manner of pursuit, that only one hand
could make a fist (he'd lost three fingers as a boy). Lost too, his ancestry

during the war; she liked that hers would have to be his own.
They married in the only way they could: a courthouse wedding

with a Ukrainian shawl spread out beneath their feet, a world
woven between them, salt and bread for luck, no rabbi or vows,

and only one picture. She's captured there against him, her eyes
near-closed, in half-sleep maybe. His arm wraps her shoulder firmly,

under his grip, shadows of her skin giving in (the hip would have been
too forward) and her linen dress is wrinkled and yellowed by light or time

or their early means. Together, they weathered: fifty summer swims
under an aging sun, until it grew too dark to see each other's movements

underwater; thirty Soviet snows when the trollies and buses wouldn't run
and he walked her three miles to the night shift, sat waiting on a snow bank

to take her home; nineteen years in a country that stayed foreign, where their bodies
became immigrants to one another; three languages (none of which were home):

Shut your mouth!
Xvatit' Lyubanka.
(silence)
You know your mother always hated me.
Goteniyu tayer! Again?
I'm not the idiot you make me out to be.
She's dead now. Miortvoya!
But you still love her more.

They raised two children; took one pilgrimage to the Holy Land
and one to the promised where they found a house with room enough

to sleep alone, him on their queen, her on the foldout, so tradition
looked unchanged. Now, they vacation with the family on annual

lush white beaches and request a room with two beds, waking
hours apart and lying under separate umbrellas, staring far beyond the horizon

where sky and ocean blend to an indiscernible blue, a thing
they both called beautiful once.