Love Apples
For her 67th birthday

If you love me, you really really love me, plant a rose for me
If you know you’re going to love me for a long long time, plant an apple tree.

Do you know how much I love you?
Each harvested day becomes more true
Because in trusting me you are as real as rain
Open, candid -- not candied -- as an apple
Ripe in judgement, firm in loving, sweet
At the heart’s core star and seed and juice
Happy man. To see perpetual flower is to
hold perpetual fruit.

Here is a selection from the 41 poems in this collection:

Valentine in a Season of White
Valentine’s Day, 2015

Decolored is this winter world of too
much snow
Enough of these smoothing simplifying
flakes decanted from the sky
Boisterous nights of moonbeams
bouncing on flowerbed, jumping
through window
Only try to photograph white on white
winter -- yet she will try
Recruit bits of bright: table linen, teapot,
orange of embered firelight
An angel aviator flying a pink scarf
against the weather
Holding love, her favorite color, snug and
warm in this chill together.