The Wedding Room

Minnetonka Cave

Shanan Ballam

They shut down the lights
to demonstrate darkness. 
I put my hand before my face
and all I know are gobs and globes of black.
This is the Wedding Room.
I know that two feet away is a slick
stalagmite, the groom, thick as a tree trunk
and gold.  His stalactite bride stretches
her spine above him.  Splats of small
water drip from her tongue 
to his eyes.

My hand swipes the dark near my hip
where your hand always waits,
but you have moved in this thick blackness.
I make my lips and tongue form
slowly and silently over the word
flowstone, flowstone,
the shiny glaze of lime
that smoothes itself across
these stones so cold and deep in the earth.
Like us, the pair is only split
by a few feet of thin space.
But it will take thousands of years
for them to touch.