studied   sonnets  on  a  chaise   lounge   in   Charleston.   Each  small 
song   clarified   the   couplet,   the   fevered   rhetoric   of   two   held 
together,  in   the  rental   car,   on   the  long  drive  south.  Each  day 
we  were more  married,  more  varied in  how  we  touched.  It  once 
made me  sad.  That  much  would  be  lost,  and  soon—Nothing  but 
tenderness and pleasure,   Samuel Johnson defined that first honeyed 
mouth  against  the  waning  moon.  On   time,  Shakespeare  alacked
its   wrackful   siege.   But  dawn’s  novel  idiom  arose   brilliant  from 
the   harbor.   Highballs   kept,   somehow,   the   thinnest   rime.   We 
shuttered   the  hotel   windows,  plotted   years  of  humid  mornings, 
scones   crumbling   in   our   sheets.  What   else,   reader,   could   we 
script   on   the  Chevy’s   rear   glass?   What   would   seem  just   still, 
returning,  as  we  must,  to  the  year,  what   would  thrill  him, might 
remind  that  even  a  slim  crescent  dazzles  the  black  ink  of  night?