poems

1/5/20, 10(24 PMMost Like an Arch This Marriage by John Ciardi | Poetry Foundation

Page 1 of 2https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47013/most-like-an-arch-this-marriage

Most Like an Arch This Marriage B Y J O H N C I A R D I

John Ciardi, “Most Like an Arch This Marriage” from I Marry You (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1958). Used with the permission of the Ciardi Family Publishing Trust.

Source: The Collected Poems of John Ciardi (University of Arkansas Press, 1997)

Most like an arch—an entrance which upholds and shores the stone-crush up the air like lace. Mass made idea, and idea held in place. A lock in time. Inside half-heaven unfolds.

Most like an arch—two weaknesses that lean into a strength. Two fallings become firm. Two joined abeyances become a term naming the fact that teaches fact to mean.

Not quite that? Not much less. World as it is, what’s strong and separate falters. All I do at piling stone on stone apart from you is roofless around nothing. Till we kiss

I am no more than upright and unset. It is by falling in and in we make the all-bearing point, for one another’s sake, in faultless failing, raised by our own weight.

1/5/20, 10(24 PMMost Like an Arch This Marriage by John Ciardi | Poetry Foundation

Page 2 of 2https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47013/most-like-an-arch-this-marriage

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