And we who loved the world must learn the language of absence: days foreshortened, empty rooms, the irrevocable distance between the goodbye and the letting go.

If strength is love, then we weren't strong enough,But if strength is letting love go, we were.

The best days of summer are the days of summer gone.

And if poetry is a bond betweenTwo hearts, it is a bond too frail:That night words failed, I, too, was lost—To whiskey, memory, a photograph.

I can't let them go, those days of summer gone.