Dear Ed, 

if you and I had been at Harvard at the same time, and given the age difference between us,
I would have very likely been your Teaching Fellow for some Slavic or any comp. lit. or just lit. course.
It's so difficult to pen down just what you are to me now--
not because I don't know it, but simply because, well --words just tend to collide much too violently
and I sincerely don't really know what to do with them in this state.

But here's reckoning --just how much sheer joy
and pleasure and sweetness
familiarity
closeness
and -well, me-ness
your whole being exudes--
and not just your physical presence--
Indeed, it so vividly feels
that particles of you
just glisten and shimmer
everywhere you tread
I swim, so swim in your wake
and I don't seem to recall
ever such a sweet and limpid an ocean
--of course History always reinvents itself--
but I just feel this --
there's just so much newness
and you yourself to be so fresh and immense
I do believe there are
gigantic auroras of tenderness
your side of the continent
and you bathe in the ochre-most of waters
there where you live.
Which I feel to be a land distant
with echoes very deep, very far, and dispersed
reaching across the skies, fields, and various lands
into the folds of the plains
where seem to grow my flowers
and where I'm lain.

I do know that we are bridged
by this one tectonic plate
which drifts dormant
bathed in pools of smoldering matter
It heaves with the heaviest of breaths and
succombs a deep exhale
So round this earth, so heavy and romp.

Maybe the words are
a little more silent now,
for having said a thing none,
danced,
and remembered.

You, sweets,
are not an angel
though so convincingly bear the
markings of a putti.

Fare.thee.well, love
Flare
the

well; wear the flame!