Gray sky, trees, several kinds of trees—maple and Japanese maple without leaves, limbs rich with pink blossoms, magnolia’s profusion the birch’s white—above and along the streets I take, cycling to your place, and thinking about you, thinking Is this love?—like moss luminous green on the bricks in front of someone’s mansion? Today is damp; no, it isn’t love. The light irradiates through a sky’s gray to make carnations red, ivy green, green moss. No, it isn’t love, although it’s true. We don’t have to pretend it is; pretend it isn’t; pretend, pretend. I wonder but I don’t pretend. Freedom is a tease, the tease of a lover. I cycle through streets of trees and although I’m cycling to your place I’m cycling wherever I please.
7 February 1981