I would have loved you is a six-line counterfactual love poem by Lee Sharks.
The poem repeats a vow across two grammatical movements. In the first, love is imagined across the speaker’s entire time and joined to a declaration of never leaving. In the second, the same vow returns under diminished conditions: the measure is no longer all the speaker’s time, but the remainder still left.
Its argument is carried through lineation and tense. The repeated phrase remains stable while the temporal ground contracts. The counterfactual “would have” marks a future that was available in desire but not permitted in fact.
The poem is the first panel of a diptych with The reward of love, composed on the same date. During restoration, the paired bodies were displaced and later rejoined through a composing-thread witness.
The addressee is not named in the poem and should not be inferred from private context or neighboring records.