Simon Armitage

“Let’s get married at the zoo!” exclaimed Scott.
“Perfect,” said Charlene. They found the name
of a humanist minister in the Yellow Pages
and he arranged to meet them at 15.30 by the elephant house.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer the glass wall of the penguin tank
as a background?” asked the minister. “They’re so vivacious and life-affirming.”
“No, here’s fine,” said Scott. “Perfect,” agreed Charlene.
“Then let’s begin. Do you, Scott, believe that friendship and decency
underpin the essence of humanity?”
“I do,” said Scott, removing a stray hair clinging to Charlene’s lip.
“And do you, Charlene, agree to hand over the universe to future generations
in an improved and morally enhanced condition?”
“I do,” said Charlene, “I most truthfully do.”
But before the minister could pronounce them husband and wife,
a hulking brute of a man in dirty waders and a peaked cap
came galumphing towards them like a monster from a film and bellowed,
“What in the name of Moby Dick is going on here?”
The minister had sidled away very smartly
and was pretending to admire the aardvark.
“We’re getting married,” said Scott.
“Not in my zoo you’re not,” said the man. “Have you no respect
for these creatures, flaunting your humanness in front of them?
Can’t you see how defeated and ashamed they are?
Have you looked the orang-utan in the face?”
Scott said, “But we’re nature lovers.” The zoo-keeper guffawed.
“You’re a pair of hypocrites. Now fuck off out of it.”
Charlene’s heart sank to the sea bed of her stomach.
She hadn’t wanted to hear a word like that on her wedding day.
“Go on, leave this place. The capybara needs its toenails cutting,
and when I come back I want to find you supremacists gone.”

It rained and there were no taxis.
The silk dress Charlene had ordered from a tailor in Wushi
began to perish in front of her eyes, and the scar on his back
where Scott had once been treated for shingles began to throb and burn.
Back in the house they argued like flamethrowers.
But later, after two bottles of chilled Veuve Clicquot
and a tray of Dublin Bay oysters in bison-grass vodka, they pushed
the coffee table to one side and in front of a glowing fire
dispensed with restraint for the first time in their lives.

For the heart shall never relinquish its claim on the crown
and from love’s furnace shall the golden infant be born.
And I should know, because my name is Sean Wain, Australian test cricketer,
peerless spinner of a red leather ball
and their beautiful bastard son.