The woman I was going to marry was standing
on a bridge, on one of three bridges,
I can't remember which, but she had a red dress on
that cost a whole week's pay. I knew because
I'd bought it for her and she'd worn it, which meant
we were in love. I gave her the flowers -- they were
carnations -- so I could take her hand and kiss it,
while the sky grumbled above us like her drunk
grouch of a father, who was out of the way, dead,
a victim of cheap gin at forty-five. It was the year of the
Bus Riots, the same day, in fact, a detective's car
was set on fire. He was beyond help by the time
she finished adjusting her lipstick, although we knew
nothing of it. By morning, 946,354 man-days' work
would be lost, along with Father's salary and what pride
he'd scrapped together after the war buried the family
fortune. A plump young mother struggled with an
umbrella over her shopping and twin babies. I knew
it was time. We stepped into shelter, I ordered coffee
and toast over the rising din and shutters slamming,
and without stirring it, downed a gulp for luck. Sweat
got as far as the wrapping but not inside, for which I prayed
in thanks to all the ancestors I could name. She couldn't
hear me the first time, nor the second, so I gave her the
little band of metal, twenty months of savings and a tooth-mark
in a corner to prove it was pure. I see now, students bleeding
and bones being broken mere streets across the city
could not have been real, not with her face a sweet
breath away from me and flushed, and clouding. Something
shifted in her eye. The world was suddenly another climate.
I never found the ring, nor even the mud-smacked box, not
with the news spilt everywhere and her back arching away
into downpour like it'd always belonged there. If there was any way
the rain could have made her more beautiful, I don't know it.

[nb: revisions]