For Trent & Alli
It takes seven months to build one, Google says,
maybe eight.
I suppose that would be true of a cut-n’-paste—
one of those kits constructed just as soon
as the paper models Trent used to glue together
in one afternoon.
If anyone would know, it’d be the two of you,
wouldn’t it?
That Rome wasn’t built in just a few minutes,
and neither was the house you constructed side-by-side,
when your lives were just blueprints,
dashed with question marks and lines.
If anyone would know, it’d be the two of you,
wouldn’t you say?
That before there was a house, there were first the frames,
and before the frames, the subfloors, and before these,
the foundation and forms
of a friendship-to-be.
Remember when it was just a hole in the ground,
with a gravel floor?
And you were the only two who could see something more,
what it would be years from then,
when the skeleton had flesh and joints,
held a heart beating deep within?
Remember Truss Day on the hill, when the bare bones
became a spine of frames,
and we grilled hot dogs across Ayre Lane
and watched as the crane delivered the roof
like one of those old-fashioned barn raisings
for a couple in their youth?
All of this brings us to your wedding day,
I surmise,
where all sorts of folk will offer advice
on how to build your house, this thing called a marriage,
how to lay the floors and keep the wallpaper
from peeling from disparage.
But it seems like you learned that lesson awhile ago
of your own will,
when you built that house on Sunset Hill,
when, before the trusses and frames ever took form,
there was first a Foundation as sure as stone
that would hold fast the thing that would be:
not simply a house, but a home.
bethanyjlincks.com 