James Allen Hall

WEDDING DRESS

My mother in a white wedding dress digs a tunnel
from her father’s house to her first husband’s house.

The escape is frenetic, the dirt walls crumble around her.
Her gloved hands plant, uproot, replant themselves
like bulbs in the dank earth.

The Paloma Blanca dirties, the chapel train tears.
Behind my mother, pearl and rhinestone beading
glimmers in the unfastened dark.

My mother in Vera Wang, faint blue organza silk, digs a tunnel
from her husband’s house past the bar he drinks away
all their money in, past the bar where he picks up his women,

past the lots where he drops them off unsatisfied and drunk,
reeling, stumbling in the dew-stricken dark, past stucco houses,
the beds where husbands and wives wait up with their midlife crises,

past the believing married people do when they want
not just the story but the holes to be true—

my mother digs until she arrives, blushing under her veil
in my father’s house. For years she stays above ground,
she lives without the dress, the digging.

But nothing can stop my mother in her Melissa Sweet,
the ruched satin too snug at the waist, her shovel glinting,
ready to injure the earth. My mother knee-deep in the gaping hole

wants to stitch herself to the underneath,
where reinvention hides its root.
The man, the earth is remade in her digging.

This is how I know my mother is a god. No
no earth could possibly hold her forever.