REUNION - Louise Gluck

It is discovered, after twenty years, they like each other,

despite enormous differences (one a psychiatrist, one a city official),

differences that could have been, that were, predicted:

differences in tastes, in inclinations, and, now, in wealth

(the one literary, the one entirely practical and yet

deliciously wry; the two wives cordial and mutually curious.)

And this discovery is, also, discovery of the self, of new capacities:

they are, in this conversation, like the great sages,

the philosophers they used to read (never together), men

of worldly accomplishment and wisdom, speaking

with all the charm and ebullience and eager openness for which

youth is so unjustly famous. And to these have been added

a broad tolerance and generosity, a movement away from any contempt or wariness.

It is a pleasure, now, to speak of the ways in which

their lives have developed, alike in some ways, in others

profoundly different (though each with its core of sorrow, either

implied or disclosed): to speak of the difference now,

to speak of everything that had been, once, part

of a kind of hovering terror, is to lay claim to a subject. Insofar

as theme elevates and shapes a dialogue, this one calls up in them (in

its grandeur)

kindness and good will of a sort neither had seemed, before,

to possess. Time has been good to them, and now

they can discuss it together from within, so to speak,

which, before, they could not.