Praise
               —for Doug and Rebecca on their wedding day

In the eye of the elephant, in the eye of the mouse, in the dark and the bright,
in the moon and sun, in the neutrino’s flight, in the electron’s spin,
in the universe expanding out or folding in, in yang and yin, in miniature,
in magnitude, in melancholy, in gratitude, in silence and in bliss,
in the Golden Mean of the nautilus, in the Boolean laptop, in tongues untied
in the barbaric yawp—love abides. In summer heat and winter hail,
in the amoeba, in the great blue whale, on the mountain crest, in the valley
swale, in taut muscle, in crumbling bone, in thunderheads, in river stone—
love abides. In Galileo and Gogol, in St. Augustine and Sartre,
in the magical mind, in the miracle heart, halfway through morning,
in midafternoon, in the quark, in the quasar, in the rush, in the swoon,
in the spark—love abides. In the spiraling arms of the Milky Way,
in Andromeda, in night and day, in the owl and the bear, in fur and feather,
in prayer—love abides. In the dance, love abides. In the dance, in the dance,
in the coming and going, in the blue shift and red, in light and gravity,
in the living and the dead, in the madeleine of memory, in the house of pain,
in joy, in suffering—love abides. On the sloop in the sound, on the raft
on the river, in the dance, in headwinds, in yaw, in the following sea, in brio
and humility, in surrendering. In the carmine evening, in the chartreuse
dawn, in the desert, in the dingle, in the robin’s song, in the humid streets
of Brooklyn, on bicycles, in bare feet, on BlackBerrys, in taxis, in the bitter-
sweet—love abides. In Limerick and Lotus, in Sally’s soothsaying dream,
in turquoise heels, on the walk on the trail, in the wedding dress, in the dry
castanets of the rattlesnake’s tail, in thistle and vetch—love abides.
In the breath of the earth, in the wind, in the rising and falling and rising
again, in the gathering, in family and friends, in the wild tribe whooping
beneath the wild tree—love abides. In the earth’s dervish around the sun,
where you are now in time undone, in the golden string, in the coming
and going of everything, in the oak’s craggy limbs, in the blue bowl
of sky, in the boundless river, in your luminous eyes, in your being,
in the dance, in your kiss—love abides.

Moira Magneson is a member of Red Fox Underground, a Sierra foothills poetry collective. Her work has appeared in Margie, Verse Daily, Runes, Hanging Loose, and elsewhere. In 2008, Rattlesnake Press published her chapbook, He Drank Because. In 2009, she spearheaded El Dorado County’s first ever Poetry Out Loud competition.