the kindness of a winter’s day

The kindness of a winter’s day

Was mine before I knew

The color in a lover’s eye

Was all the color of the sky

And then a more of blue

The softness of a whisperbreeze

Now feels too rough to me

When I compare the silken soft

Of fingertips, the precious slope

Of our symmetry

And now the birds can never sing

A half so happy air

As that my lover spoke to me

By being—oh, the symphony

That was when she was there


1987; 1996