Keeper of Limits

A Pulitzer Prize-winning author details an unconsummated love affair that sustains political, philosophical, and sexual interest over a lifetime.

The truth is always different
from what anyone says out loud,
but who really cares? Not I, said the man
I chose to be, nor I nor I nor I—
among the many of us she left teetering.

Stephen Dunn is a Pulitzer Prize winner and the author of seventeen collections of poetry, most recently Lines of Defense, Here and Now, and What Goes On: Selected & New Poems: 1995-2009. He teaches at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.