! Lines From The Pub

You, slim but well-nourished, not unhandsome, dark, perhaps of Middle East descent, who's just come in the door at the speed of a second-ring bellhop carrying a neat cone of not many flowers from the florist's down the road but unsmiling, focussed, almost fiercely anxious as if you were a well-trained rifleman yet fearing that you might have missed one vital point in training - what are you bringing from an anxious past on this, perhaps, lifetime's vital day for the girl already waiting there whom alas I cannot see to burden with my assumptions - what are you bringing from your past besides those flowers, to take into your anxiously-hoped-for future together? No, you may not indeed, right now, be worthy of 'her hand'; - nor may she, indeed, of yours; that's, perhaps, the miracle of marriage.