A Habsburg match

1

It seemed ordained.

Both of them God-bestowed round the same time;

No proxies would be needed at the church.

They would be joined when she was tall enough

To fit the dress, diamantine brocaded,

That had belonged to small-pox buried aunt.


Their future prospects too great to be good,

Just one dissenting envoy said. “For he

Is heir to arid plains won by the sword,

To tilled and serried verdant fatherland,

Peninsular gem-cities, guarded isles,

And lordship of the heathen Cherokee.

And she? Will wear the mildest western crown,

Whose soft gold teases out a stream of tax,

Whose malleable sceptre subjects strokes,

Those tyrannied sea-people,

Those slaves who feel so blessed free.


“Sirs, what have you done, what do you do?

You parcel the first reign of all the earth.”


2

They do not care for awkward boundaries,

Not much more than they care not for each other,

Acquainted by inexpert hack portraits.

But they are not impassive. The princess

Gladly awaits her dead aunt Bessie’s dress;

And the prince wonders when the cannon sound.

They stick to expectations and go on.

At the altar they are vague, pleasantly so.


3

She thinks her husband a strange sort of boy,

So many words for everyone, quacking

In a garbled, hasty voice that self-corrects

And stumbles; yet he hardly speaks to her

And sounds like a bad actor when he does.

He wishes they weren’t watched

(She’s used to it. She’s been told dignity

Is always less vulgar than privacy).

He knows no conjugal demand

Can get her on her own; he doesn’t know

If this is under foreign protocol,

Or what she wants.


4

He gets into the habit of talking

To everyone when she has left the room

About love. To young, uninterested courtiers,

Old ones, who find it funny though don’t laugh,

A passing poet, and the queen his mother

(He sails back to his kingdom just to reach her),

Who answers “I don’t think, if your conduct

Is as you have described it, well,

I’d scarcely love you either. Restes tranquil.”


The princess misses him a little though.

She moves their household to a port-town, where

A maid falls dead of plague. She crooks

Her regal lips, and boredly wonders

If, when reunited, in heaven with her lord,

Things will perhaps feel easier than this.