For Instance
By John Ciardi
A boy came up the street and there was a girl.
"Hello," they said in passing, then didn’t pass.
They began to imagine. They imagined all night
and woke imagining what the other imagined.
Later they woke with no need to imagine.
They were together. They kept waking together.
Once they woke a daughter who got up
and went looking for something without looking back.
But they had one another. Then one of them died.
It makes no difference which. Either. The other
tried to imagine dying, and couldn’t really,
but died later, maybe to find out,
though probably not. Not everything that happens
is a learning experience. Maybe nothing is.
Copyright Credit: John Ciardi, "For Instance" from For Instance. Copyright © 1979 by John Ciardi. Used by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Source: Poetry (August 1978)