Poem for Vows

A new song, and how it came to be.

Wes Bockley is a retired rock & roll t-shirt manufacturer, the father of my best friend, Seth, and a life-long poetry nut. In the years after I graduated from college, he used to forward poems to Seth and me, often via Poem-a-Day/poets.org. Sometime in early 2011, he sent us a poem by Matthew Zapruder called “The Prelude,” which began:

Oh this Diet Coke is really good,
though come to think of it it tastes
like nothing plus the idea of chocolate,
or an acquaintance of chocolate
speaking fondly of certain times
it and chocolate had spoken of nothing,
or nothing remembering a field
in which it once ate the most wondrous
sandwich of ham and rustic chambered cheese
yet still wished for a piece of chocolate
before the lone walk back through
the corn then the darkening forest
to the disappointing village and its super
creepy bed and breakfast.

I was smitten, found Matthew’s email address, and asked for his permission to set it to music. That setting would become the first movement of a song cycle called Come On All You Ghosts, after the collection of the same name. It also began a collaboration that has now spanned more than a decade. Other than my own lyrics, Matthew’s words are the ones I have set to music the most, most recently in Final Privacy Song, a setting of a long poem I commissioned from Matthew, which exists in a version for piano and voice, as well as a newer arrangement with the addition of string quartet. 

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Emma and I had been living together in Brooklyn for the better part of four years when, at around 3am on a chilly December evening, I stood at the threshold of our front door and impulsively proposed to her. I had just gotten back from a two-week tour and was headed to Boston the next morning for another week of work. When she answered the door in her nightgown, I guess I came to my senses. We’d been to a number of weddings that summer, and people kept asking when we were going to tie the knot. 

From the moment we sat together on a porch-swing at a Brooklyn house party on a sultry June night in 2010, I knew that I was supposed to make a life with Emma. At the same time, in the early days—and years—of our courtship, I was ambivalent. I was still smarting from a bad breakup, and sometimes had the urge to bail. But I also had the sense that my impulse to give up on a relationship with this kind, intelligent, and deeply ethical person was a sign of immaturity. I kept telling myself that if I hung around, I would grow into an awareness of how lucky I was to be in cahoots with her. Eventually, those old wounds healed. Then came that wee hour proposal, and a few weeks later, a chaotic trip to City Hall accompanied by a dozen of our friends who happened to be in New York City on New Year’s Eve. Chinese food around the corner followed. 

Over the next year, we had a rolling series of parties: one in Brooklyn, one in Eugene, one in Los Angeles. About a month before the party in Brooklyn, a manila envelope from Matthew Zapruder arrived, containing the typescript for a new poem:

Poem for Vows

(for E. and G.)

Hello beautiful talented
dark semi-optimists of June,
from far off I send my hopes
Brooklyn is sunny, and the ghost
of Whitman who loved everyone
is there to see you say what
can never be said, something like
partly I promise my whole life
to try to figure out what it means
to stand facing you under a tree,
and partly no matter how angry
I get I will always remember
we met before we were born,
it was in a village, someone
had just cast a spell, it was
in the park, snow everywhere,
we were slipping and laughing,
at last we knew the green secret,
we were sea turtles swimming
a long time together without
needing to breathe, we were
two hungry owls silently
hunting night, our terrible claws,
I don’t want to sound like I know,
I’m just one who worries all night
about people in a lab watching
a storm in a glass terrarium
perform lethal ubiquity,
tiny black clouds make the final
ideogram above miniature lands
exactly resembling ours, what is
happening happens again,
they cannot stop it, they take off
their white coats, go outside,
look up and wonder, only we
who promise everything despite
everything can tell them
the solution, only we know.

We sat on the couch, reading and weeping silently. When we moved to Portland, we hung the poem in our living room above the old upright piano we’d found on Craigslist. One day, sometime shortly after the birth of our second child, I started improvising a melody to the opening lines of the poem, and then, a few days later, set the whole thing to music. 

When you have small children, time goes sideways. That’s my excuse for dallying until now in getting this tune out into the world. (Our younger daughter is now two years old.) But over the last couple of weeks, a production emerged, thanks in large part to the boundless talents of my friend and longtime co-conspirator, Casey Foubert, who mixed the tune, as well as having supplied bass, drums, and lead guitar.

Here it is, “Poem for Vows.”