"The chuppah" The chuppah stands on four poles. The home has its four corners. The chuppah stands on four poles. The marriage stands on four legs. Four points loose the winds that blow on the walls of the house, the south wind that brings the warm rain, the east wind that brings the cold rain, the north wind that brings the cold sun and the snow, the long west wind bringing the weather off the far plains. Here we live open to the seasons. Here the winds caress and cuff us contrary and fierce as bears. Here the winds are caught and snarling in the pines, a cat in a net clawing breaking twigs to fight loose. Here the winds brush our faces soft in the morning as feathers that float down from a dove's breast. Here the moon sails up out of the ocean dripping like a just washed apple. Here the sun wakes us like a baby. Therefore the chuppah has no sides. It is not a box. It is not a coffin. It is not a dead end. Therefore the chuppah has no walls. We have made a home together open to the weather of our time. We are mills that turn in the winds of struggle converting fierce energy into bread. The canopy is the cloth of our table where we share fruit and vegetables of our labor, where our care for the earth comes back and we take its body in ours. The canopy is the cover of our bed where our bodies open their portals wide, where we eat and drink the blood of our love, where the skin shines red as a swallowed sunrise and we burn in one furnace of joy molten as steel and the dream is flesh and flower. O my love O my love we dance under the chuppah standing over us like an animal on its four legs, like a table on which we set our love as a feast, like a tent under which we work not safe but no longer solitary in the searing heat of our time.