At Parting

Now that you’ve gone on
I know that I too must depart from the tragedy of our being.
The quiet death of symbiosis.
You to your corner with the ones you’ve found best to love,
And myself across the fields, looking and, in time becoming.
The companionship will grow ancient, a memory of stone
and we’ll hear about marriages, and kids, and unkinder
tragedies like obituaries in the paper.
And occasionally I’ll cry about it, and want to drive out
and say hello, but that is what we had been doing,
that is as far as we got before small and terrible things
came in between.
And that is, after all, what life has come to be, such little
things come between, born at times from you and from me.
But do we hate the oysters so much that we shun the pearls?
A life so short but we scream of injustice at the things from which we will
surely depart.
And it won’t be soon before long that the eons arrive and we may
pick up at where we’ve left in fellowship.
Until then we have our verses on our hearts, the births of soft odes.
