She reminds me of the trees in late spring,
new leaves changing colors so microscopically
you miss the blending entirely if you blink.
Sometimes I think she herself
has no idea of her brilliance, and it
makes me feel as if I’ve done something wrong,
in not making it more obvious.

I don’t remember exactly when I started writing poems for you. Usually, everything I write is dated, in case I need that information for something later. With your poems, though, I’ve never felt the need to assign a date. It feels like I’d be betraying the emotion in them if I tried to lock them into a particular space in time. I don’t edit them or change them, but I feel as if they grow over the years, in some miniscule way that I can’t see or understand. And I don’t want to taint that by trapping them in a moment. It’d be a betrayal of you.

Not that you’d ever know. I’ve never let you read them. Everything else I’ve ever written, I want you to read. I want your feedback. But with your poems, I can’t ask for that. I have the lingering suspicion that you’d tell me they’re good, because you tell me that about everything I write. But you’d amend it with some seemingly offhand comment about how you’re not interesting subject matter, and that I shouldn’t waste my time and talent writing poems for you. That would tarnish them, in some way, at least for me. The very fact that you’d feel unworthy of them would make them fold in upon themselves, and any I might write in the future would disappear before the inspiration to write them hit.

I wish I had the words and the eloquence with them to express what you mean to me in a way that you would understand. I know that you already know, and I also know that you can never even begin to comprehend. It seems like that would be a contradiction, and I suppose it is, in the technical sense of the term. But it makes perfect sense to me, because when I allow myself to believe in the good things that I find myself hoping for so often, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you feel exactly the same way.