poetry texts, poem archive at plagiarist.com

The pact that we made was the ordinary pact 
of men & women in those days 

I don't know who we thought we were 
that our personalities 
could resist the failures of the race 

Lucky or unlucky, we didn't know 
the race had failures of that order 
and that we were going to share them 

Like everybody else, we thought of ourselves as special 

Your body is as vivid to me 
as it ever was: even more 

since my feeling for it is clearer: 
I know what it could and could not do 

it is no longer 
the body of a god 
or anything with power over my life 

Next year it would have been 20 years 
and you are wastefully dead 
who might have made the leap 
we talked, too late, of making 

which I live now 
not as a leap 
but a succession of brief, amazing movements 

each one making possible the next 

Added: 25 Mar 2002 | Last Read: 7 Jun 2025 7:05 PM | Viewed: 13287 times

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