(on being interviewed by her biographer)
Little by little my gender drifts away
leaving the bones of this person
whose shoe size was your size
who traded dresses in our pool
of public-occasion costumes:
yours the formal-length jersey
mine the cocktail wool
and your dead mother’s mink coat that
I always said looked like a muskrat.
It fades, the glint of those afternoons
we lay in the sun by the pond.
Paler, the intimate confidences.
Even the distances we leapt in poems
have shrunk. No more parapets.
The men have grown smaller, drier,
easier to refuse.
Passion subsides like a sunset.
Urgency has been wrung from the rendezvous.
Now that the children have changed
into exacting adults, the warmth
we felt for each other’s young
takes on the skin tone of plain daylight.
However well-fed and rosy
they are no kinder or wiser then we.
Soon I will be sixty.
How it was with you now
hardly more vivid than how
it is without you, I carry
the sheer weight of the telling
like a large infant, on one hip.
I who am remaindered in the conspiracy
doom, doom on my lips.
from Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief,, Viking/Penguin, 1982
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