— For Nasrin
Agape, eros, caritas, and such
we known them all for forty years,
learning, without touching, how to touch
to coddle each other’s wonts and fears.
What’s mine is yours, yours is mine.
Whatever else may now elapse
we share the quiet purr of a feline
sleeping alternatively on our respective laps.
So let me claim in stilted verse,
conceding I may yet be biased,
among love’s various impenetrable sorts
compatibility is the highest.