David Kirby

                  Chelsea Wedding

I call this poem “Chelsea Wedding” not because it took place
in Manhattan’s iconic Chelsea district but because the bride
was our friend Chelsea and her groom was Jack, whom we didn’t
meet till the day of the ceremony, so it could also be “Chelsea
and Jack Wedding” but it isn’t. The ceremony itself was okay.
It was the usual—we are gathered together, do you, yes I do,
and so on. The pastor was a pleasant-looking 30ish fellow
who also had an MFA in poetry so not too pastor-y.
But when he ran down the whole list of do-yous, I’m sure
I wasn’t the only guy on that lawn and certainly not the only
married guy to review his own performance as the pastor
worked his way through one potential pitfall after another:
do you promise to protect her (sure!), to fulfill her needs
(what are those?), to not eat the last of the ice cream
(B- on that one), to cheer for her sports teams (what?),
to protect her from elephants (what?). Then Chelsea and Jack
washed each others’ feet, which was a mystery to me
and will always remain so since we were sitting
in the back and couldn’t see them, though I imagined Chelsea
sliding her slipper off and putting it to one side as she gazed
dreamily into the distance and thought about the joy to come
and Jack struggling with his shoe laces and regretting
that he had double-knotted them that morning and then
pulling off a sock, giving it a sniff, popping it a couple
of times so it’d be easier to put back on when the foot washing
was done, and so on. Then it was over. Then everybody
went up onto the porch and had cocktails. Then we went
inside and danced. Boy, did we dance. We did the Jerk,
the Fly, the Shingaling, the Boogaloo, and the Mashed
Potatoes. A baby waddled onto the dance floor, and when
the baby began to do baby things, we tried to do them, too.
When the baby fell backward and landed on its bottom,
we did, too. Half of us yelped because the baby was wearing
a diaper and we weren’t. The other half were drunk
and didn’t yelp. Later I learned that a lot of couples wash
each other’s feet these days. Martha and I didn’t do that.
We just went down to the registry office and had the guy there
marry us. Same guy had a stack of applications for fishing licenses
on his desk, but I didn’t take one; I don’t like to fish.
Also I could have called this poem “Chelsea’s Wedding”
but it wasn’t Chelsea’s, it belonged to all of us.

David Kirby is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University. Entertainment Weekly has called Kirby’s poetry one of “5 Reasons to Live.” In 2016, Kirby received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Florida Humanities, which called him "a literary treasure of our state." He is currently on the editorial board of Alice James Books.