A Love Poem In Extremis

I love you with the slowest love on earth, love embedded in the mineral existence of canyons and chasms, stretching across continents and centuries past counting. I love you with the patience of a gardener who waits sixty years for one flower to bloom. Through sleet, through scorching sunrays, he lavishes his lonely care. And on a dim morning of his old age, a scarlet flower shines. No longer alone, he breathes its bright fragrance as night descends. I love you with my love of books because reading long hours of solitude, turning page after pages brings ever closer the secret of delight, until it is revealed to one alert to the other language of composition, a parallel language not of words but of alien sounds audible only to the lover's inmost hearing, poised to change very character into the beloved. Every book I touch becomes our love story. I love you with the passage of night into day. Flung against columns of darkness, I stumble across blank fields, through waters without memory, up hills wit no vistas. I drop to my knees and grope, a blind man yearning for your light. And suddenly I see your face in a star-cluster! The stars fade into morning. I arise and your presence is still warm with their distant fires. I greet you suffused in beams of sunlight.