Three Poems is a lyric triptych organized by tense and modality.
The movements are:
1. “I would have loved you” — counterfactual past; love displaced into the subjunctive by conditions outside the speaker’s control. 2. “The reward of love” — destructive present; injury, exhaustion, and diminishing return. 3. “I have loved you” — conditional future reception and present-perfect actuality.
The third poem does not cancel the first two. It makes a different tense available: the love is declared actual even though recognition remains conditional.
The body also treats lineation as structural argument. The first poem uses compact repetition; the second breaks into increasingly strained enjambment; the third moves from a long turning sentence to two short final lines.
The first and second poems were separately deposited on May 22, 2026. The third first appears in this combined record. The standalone deposits preserve their historical states; the triptych is declared the canonical literary form.