A Love Poem

The brief amnesia of a kissing girl

Pins down a bitter wisdom on the heart,

Pins down the hands that travel into time,

And breeds a word - words are not counterpart

To this forgetting. Time is not a gauge

Where I can measure how my kissing girl

Grows with her laughter daily into me,

Or how the heart's rage sees again the world

New-naked, and absolved of counterfeit.

These are the victims of my lost disease

That pass, uneasy, urgent into dream,

All, in her kissing, granted their reprieve.

Feel, stealing into me my timeless darling,

More hearts than a breast holds; more hands and hopes

Than this old world remembers I forget

For the new language that our silence shapes.