“For the man who should loose me is dead, fighting with the Duke in Flanders, in a pattern called a war. Christ! What are patterns for?” — Amy Lowell

* * *

“i too am a rare
pattern. as i wander down
the garden paths …”
— Amy Loewell, Patterns

And you answered, “it shall be as you said.”

And I’m dead and you think of my deathblow

as you walk up and down with brushed forehead
on our garden path, giving way to snow,
in your stiff gown, gorgeously arrayed, boned
and stayed. But not as Amy Lowell wrote down.

You’re no lady and I no colonel, stoned
on cheap morphine, in a French trench. I drowned,

not in Flanders, but at sea. You’ll grow old
walking our path; but I will be nineteen
evermore. If it had been death at war
and not a mistake, would that have consoled
you? As if a bullet wound and gangrene

would make such a difference for evermore.