31.

There was a window on the stars, the cusp

Of the bay caught the curve of your neck

And the boats caught the sun in repetition,

Heaving on the waves like youth in heat:

It wasn’t elegant, and some barn

In a memory — it could have been in Somerset

Or another leaning in the Gatineau — eclipsed

The sun in Provence, forgetting Petrarch.

That kind of plank will not do in poetry

A cove is not a cave, a poet not a farmer.

The tired sublimity of words refuses

To make love an eclogue, to hoe laurel.

No matter what the troubadours said

Love, knowing absence, is in heart as much as head.