51 PROOF

Once you said to me my love needs proof.
It is not enough to gaze into your eyes,
or drive eighty miles to be under your roof,
or hold your hand under an autumn sky.
As though this were just some recreation
I'd undertaken.  Though geometers
and lawyers engage in such disputation,
there is no certainty argument confers.
The heart is another thing and surely knows,
--at least if it is not alloyed of tin.
Constancy too neither comes nor goes,
but remembers always its own heroine.
Love cannot be proved, so say the sages,
but look how I labor to set you on these pages.