Miniaturized Trees
in Tiny Pots at 3501
New York Avenue, NE,
Washington, D. C.
To thrill his body never could have been
The fact, much less the metaphor, of love.
That’s not what love is anyhow. Between
Us was full-blooded sympathy above
That sort of thing, or walled up, fenced outside
It in the arboretum of his mind.
Affliction that we shared took in its stride
The whole Atlantic. Our pains refined
This tantalizing friendship like the roots
Of bonsais cut to make them gnarled and neat.
This neatness was the one thing that the fruits
Of distant pruning failed to make complete.
This midgetizing and its tortured trees
Resembled love, though, not deformed disease.