Cinco de Mayo Marriage
By Laurie Byro
When I was in a dormitory at school with 3 roommates, I said I wouldn't date or get serious until I found my heart of gold, Neil Young and play my invisible harmonica. That year, my roommate bought me a harmonica, I never learned to play it but the following Thanksgiving I was at Henry’s Bar with a friend listening to music.
The band was playing Moon Dance by Van Morrisson and I started talking to the guy next to me, Mchael Byro, who went there to hear his friend play. We left, Michael more or less followed us. At the next bar, I pulled out my harmonica and said "I never learned to play this" and Michael says "I know how" and without me saying played "heart of gold" and the rest as they say, is history.
Michael and I got engaged on Cinco de Mayo in 1978 and married the next Cinco de Mayo and as it is to celebrate a battle, I think that's appropriate because you have to fight to keep your marriage going, not to take it too personally as it becomes a separate entity.
Photo above is Michael and me on our wedding day at Skyland Manor, on my 21st birthday, May 5, 1979.
Since then, our life has been one big trip. We swam with stingrays and dolphins (loved that) rode roller coasters and hot air balloons (hated that) visited Greenland recently, Barge and River Cruising. We thought we'd drown on a banana boat which had a telephone pole as it's mast. It was on a local excursion from St. Vincent to Mustique, 3 hours each way, you poop in a pail I guess on the poop deck behind the captain. We were the only people not visiting a neighboring relative. It rained and the boat nearly capsized. There was a hotel the Cotton House, it was like $800 a night in the 70's. It was for the rich and famous. I wasn't one, but there were only flights 3 days later, so we used their bathroom, they were kind and we got back on that boat a few hours later.
We travel 2 or 3 major trips each year. This year with God's grace and the creek doesn't rise we're going to the Caribbean for 4th of July and then Nice/the South of France on a cruise, and Morrocco and the Canary Islands in December. Staying in Barcelona for Christmas.
In May we celebrated 45 years of marriage on my 66th birthday. Getting married on my birthday means only one present, but I guess our marriage is the gift that keeps on giving.
We don't have kids, another story for another day, it didn't happen, I found out just recently by one of those 23 & Me why I never got pregnant. Our cats, Sharon would tell you, are our babies.
Cinco de Mayo: Anniversary Poem
Spring ripples on the lake,
on the grasses. When he drives
hard and fast along the rutted dirt
of a country lane, they can’t wait
to begin. The cheap motel forgotten
as they sink into the backseat
by the lake: hemlocks fan their heat.
Now, twenty years have passed,
he gathers dust of the same back road,
takes her hand as they conjure up
moonlight, rainfall and peepers.
He senses her readiness to let grudges
fall away with their clothes.
All that is holy is here in this car.
They have dug graves and filled them
with their losses.
Her lips plump when he blows on them,
hemlocks spread their branches.
They listen to spring rain, the creaks
and sighs of their car. He tastes her,
rubs the small of her back
kneads into her hollows
until she lifts her hips to the arch
of his thumbs. He pauses to kiss
her again, lightly like pollen
he covers her stomach with butterflies.
She goes limp. Twenty years gone,
she is crying the same as before.
Her high rapid music slows,
tree frogs, the lull of rain. He brings her back
again and then again, quick
and then another. When he loses
himself into her finally, he is the tremor
that pushes out the windows,
the electric lightning of her eyes.
They have started the slow steady
crawl into the battlefield.
They have followed the beating
of the drums. Despite all
their misgivings, they will win.
I studied it first the way you liked to rise
as the rain would begin announcing our first day
of travel how each word would fold perfectly
into the next snuggle up as if in a sleeping bag
with us as its circle pressed up tight inside the hour
how you’d notice a wolf spider astounded by black
and coral bands wrapped around its legs
like a revolutionary spider how we would return
home differently than before to all our own creatures
bear and raccoon looking at us silently as we pulled
the world back up to their lairs how my hair
would have new wands of gold and coral threads
how the woman who spun the embroidered braid
wouldn’t know a word of our language
how the drops of rain would spin webbed
patterns inside the voiceless leaves
You parted the cool braid
of my hair, it snaked like rain along your shoulder.
Early autumn: yellow leaves laid
a pattern of eyes at our window. Colder
weather would cower them into cones
and we would sit crossed-legged on the bed
each uncurling the other like a fortune teller’s hand. Poems
didn’t hold us as much as time passing. We read
to one another. You told me my hair
was a fragile ladder, we needed to escape
the turbulent green rivers that dared
to take us under. You kissed the nape
of my neck and spun out the coils of golden brown.
We practiced an ancient tapestry, the art form we found.
I tried to tell you about the barbed wire man
and how as a kid I was frightened of that starved
hound of his, the snarl and bite of wire round
the shack that he called home. You never listen
when I am like this. You invent ways to compare me
to a mandolin, your callused fingertips wanting to strum,
to pluck my body like a string. I shake you off.
The wire of my body is being stripped from the inside
out. The lining of my spine heaves with nerves
that are taut and frayed. I tell you I am afraid.
You never believe me. Instead, your nails move back
and forth across the frets of my wrist. You play
chords on my arm, croon “Don’t be afraid, hush.”
You sink into me on your couch and run me through
the lush green forests of childhood. You rehearse
me on your guitar, eyes half-closed against the bright
summer moon. I study your arms as you play,
mesmerized by the clawed fingers, the rusty
glint of hair. There is a river we cross and we pull one
another along through a crooked wire fence.
We arrive skin on skin and only slightly torn.
The wire man sleeps. We replace him with this.
The poem below is about the Clinton Castle.
https://weirdnj.com/stories/clinton-road/
Castle
I am in the abandoned castle again,
your pea coat thick around me, too heavy
and coarse to take wing. I am afraid
to fly. You call me a curious moth, a delicate
bat. Those times we’d sneak off to part weeds,
play house in the eroding turrets where a man
built his wife a castle from solid grey stones.
If I am now a statue, let me speak. You’ve chiseled
every line and curve, cleaved me with the force
of a working man’s arm. You’ve chipped me away;
virgin pieces fall pink to white bone. Shadow mice
scatter and I leap from flame to wild rose.
We’d savor those nights you’d brush soft
plump lips on untouched skin. I’d shiver, follow
a trail of brambles to forage dripping fruit knowing
you’d leave a rivulet of sweet stains down my neck.
Owls would glare at us in the sleep of trees. We’d
moan at them in sex. We were creatures unknown,
barely recognizable. Green thorny arms would clutch
a bouquet of flesh. You fashioned me pretty
with your sharpest tools. The castle burned to the ground
from mice who ran through the forest, the strike-anywhere
matches clamped firmly in their teeth. Each spring, we’d plant
cuttings of forsythia and lilac from a faraway farm.
It was a bruise that had reversed and faded backwards,
yellow to purple. We’d speak of the castle, the bushes
given back to wildness. The spreading flowers
would burst into flames as if to protest happiness.
