Marion Strobel

From “That Year”

LET us not linger over a good-bye:

It is not fitting

That in this too casual life

I, who called you wife

So many weeks ago,

Should stretch past glory

Into present woe.

You are not more to me—

Leaning now against the lintel of my door

And quavering your stagy, “Nevermore to live with you”—

You are not more to me

Than a familiarity of face

And figure.

You ask if I remember

That Sunday in December—

Why treat finality

Elaborately?—

Weaving an intricate fatuity of sighs and words

About a simple ending,

Pretending that we

Achieve tragedy!

Quietly you cross the room—assume

That I am unaware of every beauty that there is

In you:

“We can be friends?”—oh, God!—you touch my hand

In the accustomed way,

And so

In the accustomed way it ends:

You do not go,

We are not friends.

And so it ends.