From a Survivor

The pact that we made was the ordinary pactof men & women in those days

I don’t know who we thought we werethat our personalitiescould resist the failures of the race

Lucky or unlucky, we didn’t knowthe race had failures of that orderand that we were going to share them

Like everybody else, we thought of ourselves as special

Your body is as vivid to meas it ever was: even more

since my feeling for it is clearer:I know what it could and could not do

it is no longerthe body of a godor anything with power over my life

Next year it would have been 20 yearsand you are wastefully deadwho might have made the leapwe talked, too late, of making

which I live nownot as a leapbut a succession of brief, amazing movements

each one making possible the next