Once my lover told me she wanted to know
The precise date she would die—
No. This is too much courage and foresight for me.
Too much planning would be involved.
Your whole life would become a poem,
And you, its calendar.
I could not do it,
Although there is nothing to do,
But too much to see—
Although how much would we see, really?
The days remaining,
Like phrases of this poem not yet written,
As future days, would still be abstract
Even as we gradually lived them,
The same as before.
I couldn’t do it for me, or for you.
Time moving would be everything,
But isn’t this everything already,
Whether or not we know precisely
When we are going to die?
And yet—the precision
Of knowing when—I need more flattery than that.
To see our death ahead of us
Would replace a general fact
With a specific one.
Why sharpen what is already a sharp knife?
If I knew, I couldn’t love her
So much as mourn for her.
But guess what. I’m doing that now anyway.
She is gone. Yeah, she left me.
I thought too much. And saw too much.
I thought I saw wrong in her.
My attempt at foresight—
Which I never, never wanted—
Betrayed me, anyway.
It removed me from her calendar.
I am gone from her poem.
It’s curious that foresight
Sends us weeping over mountains of the past,
Just as ghosts of whole poems haunt passages.
Don’t they?