Because You Came to Me

for Beth

Because you came to me with sweet compassion

and kissed my furrowed brow and smoothed my hair,

I do not love you after any fashion,

but wildly, in despair.

Because you came to me in my black torment

and kissed me fiercely, blazing like the sun

upon parched desert dunes, till in dawn’s foment

they melt, I am undone.

Because I am undone, you have remade me

as suns bring life, as brilliant rains endow

the earth below with leaves, where you now shade me

and bower me, somehow.