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