From a Survivor

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