Princess Diana's Hat

Thumbing through my Charles and Diana
paperdoll cutout book, I suddenly remember
Diana’s honeymoon hat, salmon-colored, with an Elizabethan plume.
Not long married ourselves, my second husband
and I watched the wedding on a huge color
television we rented for the occasion.

If I’d still been married to the Welsh poet,
I would be in bed, watching by myself, while he bitched about the filthy aristocrats, smoking and writing poetry. Don’t think its easy being married to a Welshman and he might say the same of me, a Brooklyn girl.
Of course he wasn’t wrong about the filthy aristocrats, who, let’s face it, don’t give
a rat’s ass about us.

When we take a vacation it’s not on a yacht to Sweden
but in an overheated station wagon to some crummy five-day
rental on the Eastern shore in August with no air conditioning.

When I think that our ordinary, nothing much has happened since
The Windsors got married in 1981 marriage worked out better than theirs,
it makes me crazy that we’re still together and they’re not.

What about Christmas? They’re in Scotland, dressed in kilts and gowns, doing the Highland fling in a goddamned castle, while we’re counting to make sure the kids have the same number of presents, making a Christmas Eve run to the market for stocking stuffers, trying to figure out how we’ll pay January’s rent before March.

So there we were, five hours before dawn,  
snuggled up, eating strawberries and cream.
Like when we used to wake up early for Wimbledon,
when you’re supposed to eat strawberries and cream,
although it’s not as much fun since my favorite tennis players
John McEnroe and John Newcomb retired.                          

I argued with my father about McEnroe.
“He’s a jerk,” Dad said. But I liked his tantrums.
I thought they were thrilling, the way girls say, “Oh, he’s awful!”
when they don’t mean it. I love the way he screamed at the officials.

So there we were in 1981, lying in the dark, holding hands,
air conditioner wheezing, eating strawberries and cream,
getting teary as the royal coach passes by,
feeling like we were just like Charles and Diana,
kindred spirits, two couples embarking on life, together.