Good-by to you whom I shall see tomorrow, Next year and when I'm fifty; still good-by. This is the leave we never really take. If you were dead or gone to live in China The event might draw your stature in my mind. I should be forced to look upon you whole The way we look upon the things we lose. We see each other daily and in segments; Parting might make us meet anew, entire.

You asked me once, and I could give no answer, How far dare we throw off the daily ruse, Official treacheries of face and name, Have out our true identity? I could hazard An answer now, if you are asking still. We are a small and lonely human race Showing no sign of mastering solitude Out on this stony planet that we farm. The most that we can do for one another Is let our blunders and our blind mischances Argue a certain brusque abrupt compassion. We might as well be truthful. I should say They're luckiest who know they're not unique; But only art or common interchange Can teach that kindest truth. And even art Can only hint at what disturbed a Melville Or calmed a Mahler's frenzy; you and I Still look from separate windows every morning Upon the same white daylight in the square.

And when we come into each other's rooms Once in awhile, encumbered and self-conscious, We hover awkwardly about the threshold And usually regret the visit later. Perhaps the harshest fact is, only lovers-- And once in a while two with the grace of lovers-- Unlearn that clumsiness of rare intrusion And let each other freely come and go. Most of us shut too quickly into cupboards The margin-scribbled books, the dried geranium, The penny horoscope, letters never mailed. The door may open, but the room is altered; Not the same room we look from night and day.

It takes a late and slowly blooming wisdom To learn that those we marked infallible Are tragi-comic stumblers like ourselves. The knowledge breeds reserve. We walk on tiptoe, Demanding more than we know how to render. Two-edged discovery hunts us finally down; The human act will make us real again, And then perhaps we come to know each other.

Let us return to imperfection's school. No longer wandering after Plato's ghost, Seeking the garden where all fruit is flawless, We must at last renounce that ultimate blue And take a walk in other kinds of weather. The sourest apple makes its wry announcement That imperfection has a certain tang. Maybe we shouldn't turn our pockets out To the last crumb or lingering bit of fluff, But all we can confess of what we are Has in it the defeat of isolation-- If not our own, then someone's, anyway.

So I come back to saying this good-by, A sort of ceremony of my own, This stepping backward for another glance. Perhaps you'll say we need no ceremony, Because we know each other, crack and flaw, Like two irregular stones that fit together. Yet still good-by, because we live by inches And only sometimes see the full dimension. Your stature's one I want to memorize-- Your whole level of being, to impose On any other comers, man or woman. I'd ask them that they carry what they are With your particular bearing, as you wear The flaws that make you both yourself and human.

In those years, people will say, we lost track of the meaning of we, of you we found ourselves reduced to I and the whole thing became silly, ironic, terrible: we were trying to live a personal life and yes, that was the only life we could bear witness to

But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged into our personal weather They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove along the shore, through the rags of fog where we stood, saying I

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