Timeless I

Great friendship leads to kindling of a kind

Unknown to lovers who have never spent

Nights they devoted purely to content

Intimate intercourse strictly of mind—

Love is expansion, at its best, of souls’

Learned connectivity in friendship first,

And then the cultivating of the thirst,

Pursuing stronger wine, and then the coals—

Embers long banked as friendship had begun—

Light into fire new brilliance from a spark

Lifting great stars from the eternal dark,

Exquisite as a newly blazing sun—

Rich is the love that from such friendship springs,

Kisses of wine—and of more stellar things.

Timeless II

In morning light, the palest leafy shade

Of birches’ green is cast upon the wall

Where portraits hang, ancestral friends who all

Keep silent watch on what the years have made

Of their descendants and their memories;

The secretary, small and staunch, remains,

And in its graceful curving shape contains

What documents can speak these histories;

Oft, in this room, the whisper of that sense

Of timeless care embracing present love

Reaches so gently from its great remove

That love fills up the room itself, immense.

When I am here, I know love so begun

Will flourish to the final setting sun.