harold I like it. I've also posted these comments in the [url=http://www.fanpop.com/spots/writing/forum/post/35485]Fanpop Writer's Group[/url] forum thread. As for the title, I think it's kind of a clever misdirection to have the title be "love", since the poem reads to me more about the journey - the relationship starting as friends, sometimes antagonistic, and then developing over the course of the poem into something more of a trusting partnership. At the same time, the title needs to be something definite like "Love", for the "ours" references to work consistently. As it is, most of the "ours" references can stand alone, as an archaic syntax saying that those things belong to you: the dance is ours, the mountain in ours, the journey is ours, the unromantic romance is ours. The only place where it wouldn't have worked (without a definite object as the title) is in the first stanza: "Ours is not" can't be read as "Not belongs to you"! So, again, nice. Given that, you might consider playing up that misdirection aspect even further, by holding off on references without the syntactical ambiguity until the end of the poem, so that the reader is unsure which reading of "ours" in intended until the end. That's all broad idea-spinning, though. The actual sense progression of the poem is well done indeed. Starting from a rejection of typical lyric tropes, then presenting a gritty, dirty and definitely physical relationship as a contrast. The people have fear, which resonates from the incipient and scary emotional intimacy, change in general, and the experienced physical harm (bruises, clouts, pain, tears, arguments, denials, etc). Then you go further and present hope and trust, despite the fear and pain: the relationship isn't lovey-dovey, there's plenty of argument and conflict, and there's no expectation that that's going to get better. But despite that (and because of that?), the two are growing together, knowing each other, and being the stronger for it. The relationship isn't a fantasy of romance and longing, but it is [i]committed[/i]. It's like a love letter written by an old married couple, knowing that each isn't perfect and also un-perfectable, but still adoring each other. The physical imagery is compelling: sprawling and untidy suggest the inevitable degeneration of the masks that new lovers present to each other, trying to impress. Eventually, though, they end up without makeup, unshaven, half-dressed, unbrushed teeth, lolling on the sofa, asking "Honey, can you get me something to drink?" The clouts and bruises suggest that the conflicts have become physical in the past, supported by the fear. There's a lot of language that could be innuendo, too: grass stains suggest rolling around in the grass, and word choice is often deliberately sensual: firm, embraces, warmth, taste, drink, entwining... At the moment, I feel like this may be one of the top five love poems I've ever read. It should be read by committed couples on their anniversaries. Certainly I would love to be addressed by such a poem. It's not perfect, of course, but I really like it. While I enjoyed the accent on the pun, I didn't feel that you needed to hyphenate friendship. I'm not sure that you need to have all the punctuation that's there, either: the line breaks are sufficient, usually, to signify a slight pause, both in reading and in sense. The first stanza's sense is "Ours is not spun of starry gazes to fix and hold." That feels a little awkward to me, both because one doesn't spin a gaze, and because I'm not sure how gazes can be expected to be fixed and held in order to make something. That is to say, I understand how one can fix your gaze on something, or hold the gaze of someone, but those are actions, processes that don't parallel the objects in the rest of the stanza. The second stanza - I should say a couplet - has a wonderful cadence; it rolls off the tongue as golden syrup. But it suggests that the couple has rejected the romantic ideas and feelings because they won't last. Or is it that they felt these things, but those feelings did not last? It's not clear whether it's a rejection of fantasy, or a statement of the impermanence of infatuation. I don't know that it can work as both, for me. I'd almost rather the "comes" in the second-to-last stanza read "come", so that it would refer to the beauty, the glory and the hardship, all three coming with each season. I love that the poem feels so intimate, and yet we finish reading it with no sense of the attributes of either party. Are they male? Female? Young? Old? Beautiful? Homely? None of that matters to the sense of the poem, and that's beautiful, too.

harold I also have to say how much I like the image you included at the end: I've climbed Mission Peak (a local hill with a vertical ascent of something like 2400 feet) again and again throughout my life, and this mountain looks enough like Mission Peak that it's almost as if he took a photo and edited it with image manipulation software. If I was better at doing that sort of thing, I'd make an attempt with GIMP and upload it for comparison. But I'm not. Still, it's entertaining for me, in addition to being a generally lovely picture.