For A.H.L.

happy birthday birthday. Yours, and so mine

also: we blow out the candles of all false

and former years;

even goodbyes are ignited; and hers hers

shall mean only mine. Cupid is freed from the

valentine;

cliches of love can cower, be frighted,

or suffered like amulets

hung over beds where no love lives.

I thought that love was passion in the parts,

fleshly or divine,

and not quite distinguishable from the general arts

of living:

I did not know how I should be suffused until

the geography and time of self was lost,

ghosted into fantasy,

and I become tangible to the world

by two skins and more than my own hank

of hair.

Now I wish the theologians were not so wrong

or that the harlequin Christ or Klee's elongated

pigeontoed god

existed somewhere dispensing grace.

One-hundred twenty years cramps the style of love's

aeons, crowds happy birthdays into too short space