Honeymoon

The young bride drunk on champagne and reefer
singes both eyebrows a delicate gray

bending too near our beach fire,
a bent Winston held in her lips.

The groom’s passed out in a nearby hotel,
shuttered light from its TV ray

risen around him like swamp gas. He dreams
of Chinook salmon nosing upstream

to spawn in the freezing gravel. The girl
keeps huddling close to my wife,

sweater unraveling, crossed shoelaces
packed with wet sand and mud.

Deep space opens over the beach,
quarks and novas, meteors, comets

above the black threshold raging behind her
foaming along the rocks.