She sat on the sofa until it was time to go

She watched the candle burning, so very slow

She remembered the time when he was there

She looked helplessly at the rocking chair

He arrived in such a way

The way superiors had predicted someday

He’d lost weight in all his Virginia toil

Removed from Semper Fidelis, though he was loyal

They went into her uncle’s den

The clock struck two and then three again

They sat and talked until it was time

To realize their mistake and make up their minds

They tried reliving their youthful sound

Of Gershwin and Santa Monica and town and gown

Of plaid dresses and Boo’s blue room in the south

Of writing and Corwin, her funny lip mouth

And then through the way they found

A place isolated far from town

A lake was their stage, the night their song

And they decided what they knew all along

So she dressed up in big white lace

And practiced her slow, somber wedding pace

He found his own black tie to wear

And they wandered the aisle, a frightened pair

She never could have been the woman he thought

He was not the man she had always sought

But circumstances were such, it was true

A change in stanza for these poets two

And she tried to match their names

To conjure an identity, one to bring fame

And he took care of her, the best he knew how

And she is able to remember all of that now

And when he touched her on their wedding night

A feeling felled her she could not fight

Together they belonged now, over thousands of miles

And the southerners, they hoped, would soon reconcile

But he lied about their days of the future

A writer, he made up stories for her

Why did she destroy their time?

With a decision she made; It would have been mine

She sits now and remembers the empty hole

That disappeared when they both left her soul

And for so long, dreams in the night

A summer into fall, a dispassionate right