The jonquils and hyacinths spread their deftly scented fingers towards us
     from where I planted them last season. Ah, spring! Perfect Southern Spring!
     I watch the wisteria wind its way up the colonnades of my family’s ancient home,
     and slouch in a rocking chair now, a glass of lemonade sweating into my calloused hand.
     Sunlight licks the edges of my eyelids now that it’s so late in the afternoon.
     The wind brings me more of Nature’s perfumes, reeling, lost in it all
     with my Honeysuckle Girl’s golden hair against my cheek, relaxed here with her.
     I suddenly remember of the roses my great uncle once wrung up from the earth whose
     huge blossoms seemed too big to be any common flower. That beauty is in my lover.

     Oh, in my mind this is all reality. I am here. I am not a drunk.
     I am forgiven and unafraid with this jazz lady in my lap, resting too,
     touching the sweet taste of lemons off my lips with her saucy tongue.
     We are silent except for the new songs of a mulatto
     coming from somewhere in the enormous house behind us.
     And mixed in the music there are the songs of frogs
     echoing back and forth from the duck pond I used to skip stones on as a student.
     Crickets are flipping through the hibiscus, and around the hydrangeas,
     singing to us as we decide to let this day last forever, such gods we are!

     Across the street, a church, its bells, while ringing hymns at noon,
     now only toll six o’clock, and it seems to go on too long.
     This day cannot close; it cannot slip into dreams!
     But those bells are hollow in our own cathedral which expects nothing,
     regrets nothing, and has forgiven us both in a baptism in angel’s tears.
     My Honeysuckle Girl, the past has no hold on me when I am with her.
     Roman thought swirls between us like index cards in a storm until we decide to talk about Seneca.
     I want to speak on the bittersweet theories
     of exile while she prefers the sound of my heartbeat. We compromise and kiss.

     Yet, we are exiles. Castaways better left alone by a world that
     cannot grasp the floral arrangements we weave between one another
     to keep ourselves aching to be naked inside this house in a bedroom upstairs.
     But I rock. I rock in my creaking chair as the sun descends,
     and she tells me how transcendental all this feels.
     We are the virtue in Virtue. Historians, philosophers, and composers
     whose mouths soak up this wisdom as if it were a divine mint julep.

     Exiles, we are a part of a much earlier society of parchment and pens
     and laurels hung on our heads for no other reason than being scholars in love.
     So forgiven, forgiven and forgiven again I feel like Heaven sliced this afternoon
     we’ve shared like a tangerine whose halves will endure longer than Aristophanes.
     Sunday we may even go into the little church across the street and sit with folks
     who have known my family back into generations dead before I was born and give thanks.
     I will sing and sing and sing some more until she sings with me to Love.
     To Love and Love alone which causes no terror or strife.
     For I have loved her, my Honeysuckle Girl, I have loved her all my life.