This poem dates to (roughly) and records (accurately, I hope) an early moment in my wife’s and my courting. The poem-in-the-poem is “Homage to Sextus Propertius,” which is, to use Pound’s phrase, “a luminous detail about our early days together,” and my aspiration for this poem is that it channels some of the spirit of Latin love elegy.

Bryan Narendorf lives in Philadelphia with his wife and their daughter. He teaches in, and is the chair of, the English Department at La Salle University. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Birmingham Poetry Review, Fjords Review, and New York Quarterly.