Sheen on your hair on the back of your book
jacket. Intellect’s steel, perhaps I said.
My friend and teacher until we did not talk,
as I heard you might not to men. Once

I had said I wanted no poems
of false problems. For instance, a boy scolded
by the mother in a dream of the dark for a girl’s
kiss of tense, pure joy.

How language betrays; how she keeps lost,
I said, as long as she was these words.
But you wrote of language, the act, to raise the blinds
and purge the dark with sun. The page

so white, the black type luminous
past all logic if we can believe. Your eyes
fierce, or so I imagined. So much light