Thank you, Kyomi, for highlighting as well as responding. It helps me as a poet to see what lines speak to my readers, and it helps me as a friend to know what touches you most personally.

This poem, written 15 years ago, is among my favorites. It's an expression of the way I experience sexual love: as a wonderful friendship that has caught fire and expanded to include our sexual selves, not as a separate compartment of our lives, but as the rest of who we are in every moment.

I'll never know if that's how she experienced our connection, but I guess it doesn't matter.