Peter Meinke is a contemporary author who has penned fourteen books of poems and short stories, and received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the Flannery O'Connor Award, and a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and The New Republic. Meinke directed the Eckerd College Writing Workshop for 27 years.

The First Marriage

for Gretchen and Herb: June 15, 1991

imagine the very first marriage a girl

and boy trembling with some inchoate

need for ceremony a desire for witness:

inventing formality like a wheel or a hoe

in a lost language in a clearing too far from here

a prophet or a prophetess intoned to the lovers

who knelt with their hearts cresting

like the unnamed ocean thinking This is true

thinking they will never be alone again

though planets slip their tracks and fish

desert the sea repeating those magic sounds

meaning I do on this stone below

this tree before these friends yes in body

and word my darkdream my sunsong yes I do I do