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What Love Is So many natural things escape our vows I had to wake you with this one, to show how winter squat down with his frost nib pen and feathered our windows in crosshatch lines; knowing yet their watery fate – O, dear, isn’t it lonely in a hut when these shows are unshared? And you were kind, waking, not to say your dream windows had been the better ones: full of mimosa calligraphy and curl-eaved pagodas… The Persistence of Romance I had to go back to where you’d arrived that day. Sad, sad stationhouse, now serving only a few feet of snipped rails. There were ruts in the earth floor where the old pipes ran. Casements were blown in or pried away; benches lay in matchstick chaos, and a smell of leather and grease made me remember the fairgrounds of my youth…receding youth… long past youth… till by some miracle I remembered how your daisy colored hair flowed out the slid-back window of that ancient sleeper, how it flecked in the sunlight as you came to a stop, and there at the old ticket window a strand of it blown loose still lay anchored in a crevice of rotting wood! It was yours, I’m pretty sure. It smelled of candy apples.
