"Rosie": for Natalie and Michael

Steven Wilbur is a slam poet, teacher, and musician in Seattle Washington. He is also a longtime friend of one Natalie R.W. Young and consequently now one of my favorite people. This is most relevent to the blog because he gave a toast at our wedding in the slam poetry style that blew me away. Luckily for everyone, we got to have lunch with him last week in Seattle and subsequently got a copy of the poem. So, without further adieu, Mr. Steven Wilbur...

"Rosie"

a wedding poem by: Steven Wilbur

"Love is a rusty red school bus named Rosie.

At first glance, you doubt a commercial drivers license

could prepare anyone to drive this colossus.

It’s scorn for tight corners and parking garages

cased in loudest forty feet in the county, and while you could turn back,

you’ve always been homesick

for wide open spaces,

and

Michael, in the morning light, Natalie is a refined silver key,

blinding you with hope of her years.

Natalie, Michael is a gallon of gas, which is to say,

potential waiting for a spark, waiting

for you,

and together you say to the knowing wind, let’s see how far we can go.

The door folds open like a page,

The furniture knows your names,

The steering wheel speaks in a tongue you barely understand.

Rosie says allons-y, which, in English, means, go.

She says,

The bold brazen way

a bus opens its throttle,

sings the highway’s songs,

and raindrops leave home,
oak seeds dare to become - this

is the way you love.

which is reassuring to you, because if love were a bus,

that bus would certainly write haiku poems about love.

Your hands folded in an allegory for aspen groves

around the wheel, you will drive

to Maine in the fall,

to Ketchikan (which is impossible)

And you will wake up

in Kansas beneath electric skies,

in Austin to seven hundred pedestrians.

You will take them to God. You will take them to their fathers.

You will wake up in towns you never intended, knowing

this means that you are in Rosie, which is to say,

in love,

you will plant a seed in the ground,

hold each other like home

within the infinite symmetry of your rings.

You will drive across three state lines on empty,

write rivers into the desert.

You will learn cacti pour themselves out

for anyone brave enough;

you are brave enough.

On the days you’re not, you know a

Mechanic who splits his time between Jupiter

and Abilene and where you are

who is,

and you may wake up to envy scrawled in paint cans. You might have to

push-start Rosie when the engine is tired,

and it might take all your friends.

You may find yourself West-Texas-stranded twenty miles from the nearest gas,

cooled in the shadow of your love before you walk

400,000 steps with the best definition of beauty you’ve found.

Trial may disintegrate the tires into flames, rocketing both of you

through those windows like the eyes of your youth.

There on the pavement, blood-and-gravel-toothed, you

will stand and stare down that axle, shouting,

I have come this far.

Not even death could make me look back.

But after that moment

you might ask, Do I have something in my teeth?

because you do, and the pavement peppering

your smile is the fabric of songs

sweeter than any engine hum or cicada symphony or pine

after the rain.

O the magnificent songs you’ll sing

with gravel in your mouths."

. . . thank you, steven

<3 mikeYnat