affection

You took a crooked line, misrepresenting

the central aspects of attraction that held you in thrall:

you falling in love and courting me as a girl -

whirling me round in an intellectual caper.

The shape of the tree I climbed was most exciting,

and the height was higher than I guessed above the ground,

but I found the panorama disillusoning.

I'll choose me another now, with greater care.

Scared indeed by the magnitude of my conceit,

which treated me to visions of scholarly infiltration -

stations which lie well wide of my reach -

but each to his own devices, now it's over.

How shocking for a woman (too) to find

her body thrills us better than her mind!