You are my secret love
would that it be other,
thus no mailed Valentine
to add to the clutter.

How amiss
could Eros' arrow that would pierce two hearts with love -
to the 'morrow?

no word from you
and the blood grows bolder,
I've taken to rereading your old poems
written for "last time" lovers,
the bitter flames
has me smolder,
as I shake and grow ever colder.

I had forgotten
the brilliance
of the country night,
it's firmament crystal bright,
given all those years
blinded by the city lights,
the screen crawling marquees,
the undulating neon,
the flashing photon peep parades,
the incessant gyre of emergency beacons,
the try too hard candle dinners,
better a distant star
that reminds us who we are
than the sun unmoved
in one's back yard.

I took you to the high country,
laid you out like a tapestry of air,
the mist, the whiff
of your
             pine-
                      y
                        hair,
        the chatter
                 of your brooks,
                                      your falls,
                                                   your gorge,
                                                          ­    the sheer madness of our strange affair!

Each time I thought of you
the mountains grew noticeably higher,
the trees stood appreciably straighter,
the rivers were a bit broader,
the lakes a little clearer,
my love, the mere thought of you,
is a force through nature.

These mountain cliffs
are a precipice of stone
where time is in no hurry
to finish what it began to sculpt
eons ago in this high back wash
that is a murmur of untold tales
available to a passing cloud.