Everyone here proclaims it. This evening even a blimp circling over the bay was selling us down below something else to buy, and love.

Does this, I wonder, explain my reluctance to utter those words in your presence Adrienne? If so let this longing now speak for my mouth.

Adrienne, I am like the closed mouth of an hourglass, twenty centuries with their million or so ancestors pressing down upon me, with the weight of their longings and their loves.

But I am closed until you take me in your arms, into your bed, and place me on the mantle of your heart, so that time, which is our blood combined, can flow again for twenty centuries or more.

Your memory prowls like an orange ferry across the stilled blue bay of my heart.

Note: Remembering a few lines - "We were very tired, we were very merry–/We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry" - from St. Vincent Millay's poem, "Recuerdo" (and happy memories associated with these lines) - while running this evening across Liberty State Park, overlooking the New York Bay.