Miniaturized Trees in Tiny Pots at 3501 New York Avenue, NE, Washington, D. C.

   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.