Goodbye.

Incredulously the laced fingers loosen,
Slowly sensation by sensation, from their warm interchange,
And stiffen like frosted flowers in the November garden.

Already division piles emphasis like bullets;
Already the one dark air is separate and strange.

Goodbye.

There is no touch now. The wave has broken
That for a moment charged the desolate sea.
There is a word or two left to be spoken
--yet who would hear it? When so swiftly distance
Out measures time, engulfs identity?

Already like the dreamer startled from sleep
And the vivid image lost even in the waking,
There is no taste now for the shrunken sense to keep,
And these, the dreamer’s eyes, are not alive to weep,
And this, the clinic heart, the dreamer’s is not breaking.

Is it so easy then? Goodbye no more then this
Quiet disaster? And is there a cause for sorrow
That in this small white murder of one kiss
Are born two ghosts, two Hamlets, two soliloquies
Two worlds apart, tomorrow?
-by Helen Spalding