James Bertolino

James Bertolino (1942-  ) is the author of 30 books and chapbooks of poetry and prose, beginning in 1968 with two chapbooks. His poetry has received national and regional recognition through a Book-of-the-Month Club Poetry Fellowship, the Discovery Award, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, two of Princeton University’s Quarterly Review of Literature book publication awards, and the Jeanne Lohmann Poetry Prize for Washington State Poets. He lives with his partner, the poet and artist Anita K. Boyle in Bellingham, Washington.

This is the poem I spoke at my son and his fiancé's Rehearsal Dinner the night before their wedding…

A Wedding Toast

May your love be firm,

and may your dream of life together

be a river between two shores—

by day bathed in sunlight, and by night

illuminated from within. May the heron

carry news of you to the heavens, and the salmon bring

the sea’s blue grace. May your twin thoughts

spiral upward like leafy vines,

like fiddle strings in the wind,

and be as noble as the Douglas fir.

May you never find yourselves back to back

without love pulling you around

into each other's arms.

— James Bertolino