when I walk in strangers' flower-beds in my sleep
flowers which redly rush out
fervent flush of poppies, poppies
that lulled me back to sleep on a starless Sunday morning
when your sheets were white as poetry, white
as my arms' pallor and bowers of perfumed magnolia flowers
and pale as the poems I wrote next to you
before the sun glowed, the I and the you
and the middle word I will not write, writing blind
because to lose the poems that came to me
in the fading Byzantiums of my dreams
is like falling out of love,
          falling,
                  out of each-other's lives,
                                       out of love,
                                       (love, love.)

and I wake up, with flowers still in my eyes
and I will never lose the pink roses growing through my eyes
even as I no longer am Candide a-sitting at your feet,
because any world where someone like you could've bloomed
is the best of all possible worlds.