I hope you see those love poems I wrote for you foresee a love unborn for honestly I confess there’s a chance love ’s perverse and won’t be foreseen altho I’ve foreseen that too and didn’t Blake say poetry divines eternal truths love among them he didn’t say it devises them anyway what should I rely on not on absence sure to change I don’t love you but nature abhores a vacuum it’s full of allusions to spare a poet from senseless grasping I want to love you so won’t that make it true it’s not illusion it’s senseless not to guess love’s likely not to second-guess a second emptiness
23 January 1980