Looking Back In My Eighty-First Year by Maxine Kumin

Instead of marrying the day after graduation,

in spite of freezing on my father's arm as  

here comes the bride struck up,

saying, I'm not sure I want to do this,

I should have taken that fellowship

to the University of Grenoble to examine

the original manuscript

of Stendhal's unfinished Lucien Leuwen,

I, who had never been west of the Mississippi,

should have crossed the ocean

in third class on the Cunard White Star,     

the war just over, the Second World War

when Kilroy was here, that innocent graffito,

two eyes and a nose draped over

a fence line.  How could I go?

Passion had locked us together.

Sixty years my lover,

he says he would have waited.

He says he would have sat

where the steamship docked

till the last of the pursers

decamped, and I rushed back     

littering the runway with carbon paper . . . 

Why didn’t I go? It was fated.

Marriage dizzied us. Hand over hand,

flesh against flesh for the final haul,         

we tugged our lifeline thru limestone and sand,

lover and long-leggèd girl.

In this poem, Kumin reflects on her decision to marry so early in her life - "the day after graduation". Thinking about all the things she never got to do that she could've done, she wonders if she made the right choice. She refers to her husband as her "lover" and said they were dizzied by each other, as if she had no control over the choices she made because her love was so strong. Again, Kumin uses a lot of enjambment to keep the poem flowing. Although she does not regret her love, she realizes she has missed out on a lot of things she could have done, and her thoughts continue to go back and forth when thinking of what she should've done.