a year now; still you lurk in all I write.
How foolish, since I never touched you, nor
had reason to expect I ever might.
Then Dante was a fool, whose girlchild muse
seems hardly to have known he was alive
much less loved back. So why should I not choose
an awkward, nervous boy of twenty-five,
who friend I tried, and tried, and failed to be?
For Heaven's not my goal. I choose to stay
in the Inferno of my poetry,
and write for you till ages pass away.
You'll never know, of course, how you've been used,
and just as well -- you wouldn't be amused.
early 1978