The End Of Bachelorhood

When you're ready to love somebody fully, you lift your feet off the ground. You know they're made of clay, and so are hers, but you decide to stop caring so you can both rise up into sweet vulnerability, security, and trust. I read something like the piece below to my wife soon after I met her, and not much later, I read another iteration from a napkin at the wedding of two friends just before they said their vows. The napkin and the lines went missing and were jumbled up in my mind. For five or ten years. Back where they started, they were about commitment-phobic, globe-trotting, gun-shy bachelors like me who were still hoping to find the right woman. I was lucky, and finally found her, or she found me. Both my feet are still off the ground, and here's my attempt to reassemble the lines I once wrote:

Perhaps you've heard the distant
conversations which went on,
describing "the trouble with Tom."
Good women all, and in many interstices
I tried to suspend my disbeliefs.

Yet their faces failed to float beside me
along the neon lights and dark cornices.
I must admit I thought of settling
for a someone reached by loving,
in her way, and tightening my arms.

But I held out for a Hepburn, an Audrey
or a Katherine, against odds for a woman
to seize the rudder on my African Queen,
to slap mosquitoes past corporate boundaries
and rendevous with me in evening gratitudes.

Long abiding for your exegesis,
I express thee now unblamed.
We will spend our days in understanding,
unlocking ignorant eons and restraints.
Before the heavens, thou wert made.

Come to breakfast with me,
and make whole thy apparitions.
We were sent my dear to steal the purple
woven silks shipped rich from Jaffa,
and your face is already here.