Message to the Bride Now since everything is so persuasive you will go on changing as always it was always the case with you, whether walking through a bedroom lit like a cool tupelo grove or slouched in a cocktail lounge, a loud hive of drowning wasps watching videotape after videotape. Since no apprentice is hypocritical you've fallen in love inadvertently, & are not finished. You'll be the bride-to-be who trembles touching the lace practicing spontaneously lifing the veil while she watches herself in the mirror where the blurry television set also reflects the mewling characters created over lunch at a producer's office six months earlier as time is measured by the watches of staff writers in Century City, California. In a field off a Vermont road you'll listen to the car ticking, the sounds of the cooling engine blending at that moment with cicadas in the blue grasses and drifting off, as theirs do, like punctuation from whatever long sentence you are, floating free then lost then free. You'll finger the veil & lift and in a dream the dream will lay its warm head down upon your mother's shoulder. Dog & bone, dog & bone, your father now in a folder for silences & song you'll waken one morning reborn as a blackbox in an Airbus crashed between two gren hills. You will have lifted the veil. But once in awhile it might occur to you that your feelings, convincing as they seem, also have the somewhat doubtful and invented taste of things someone recalls you telling him about during a long conversation the two of you had in his head. This then is my only question. After he asked if you could say for sure whether or not you would allow yourself to lead a happy life in spite of the fact your parents had not, how do you think you answered, how did you reply? -- David Rivard