Etymology and the Esperanto

Somewhere between lolling in our chairs at the Esperanto, where we often confabbed about the art of penning love letters to boys who hardly appreciate love letters and waiting anxiously for Etymology, the only class we ever shared in college, to start, Rich penned the following poem for me.

"For Sabila"

She sighs, crying, "When will someone come
to sweep me off my feet, Rich?"
But I don't know, why there is no 'us' ––
even when there's a 'you' and a 'me', love.
And she's really very beautiful, my friend.
If you could only but see her, reader.
You'd want to abduct her from the page,
steal her away from me, carry her off
into the wilting wake of day.
I won't let you take her from me. But if you could taste ––
the way her sable hair succumbs to her neck,
spilling on to fitful shoulders ––
how her delicate frame deliquesces into mine.
How the spoon tries to hug the fork
but cannot find its fit here –– or there.

Sabila is studying for her Whitman final now.
She says that Walt loves all,
would love her as well. (And I guess that means he could
love me too.) And maybe I should better disguise her,
wrap her up in twine and knots, in splendid Technicolor veils,
so that she will not be known for being who she is and is not.
I cannot paint her well enough in words,
to write how her hand sometimes catches her cheek
to keep her sultry mind in check.
She told me once that sometimes, walking from the PATH,
she'll sometimes talk to herself, and that's the moment I knew that she was me,
a part of me lost, absorbed in her delicate exterior, in her dark skin,
torrential hair, like shadows to pull me into her nighttime sun.
She is the moon –– the truth illusion imparts.
We are so caught in idyllic dreams and romantic fancies, spoon.

In darker recesses, my mind deconstructs the phantom
beanpole-vestige, the man this fork would allow him knife.
She says he's arrogant and uptight (but really taciturn and scared, I think)
and suggests I stop passing him wanton notes to feed his ego fuller.
And we say that we are writers and cannot live in reality's tenure.
He is so Gothic and beautiful, I sigh. How I could siphon
black ink from his hair to transubstantiate into poems –– for him ––
to drape about his dripping-cold and stoic, tenuous form.
She sips her tea and I quaff cup-of-coffee depression until,
gazing into her labyrinth, am Lethe to be found,
escaping the fugue of unrequited want back into her serene asylum,
to break from oceanic seas which seize me in their sepulcher.
Together –– We are so taken with our own rubescent dormition, friend.
Sometimes I think we are like Evelings hedging the fall.