“The Diagnosis” by James Tate

……………Lincoln was sixty years old when the
doctor told him he only had forty more years
to live. He didn’t tell his wife, with whom
he confided everything, or any of his friends,
because this new revelation made him feel all
alone in a way he had never experienced before.
He and Rachel had been inseparable for as long
as he could remember and he thought that if she
knew the prognosis she would begin to feel alone,
too. But Rachel could see the change in him
and within a couple of days she figured out
what it meant. “You’re dying,” she said, “aren’t
you?” “Yes, I’m dying,” Lincoln said, “I only
have forty years.” “I feel you drifting away
from me already,” she said. “It’s the drifting
that kills you,” Lincoln whispered.

*

James Tate is the author of over 20 poetry collections, including the posthumously published The Government Lake (2018), The Ghost Soldiers (2008), Worshipful Company of Fletchers (1994), which won the National Book Award, and Selected Poems (1991), which won the Pulitzer Prize and the William Carlos Williams Award. His first major collection, The Lost Pilot (1967), was selected by Dudley Fitts for the Yale Series of Younger Poets when Tate was just 23 and still a graduate student.

© LIT Magazine Issue #3, 2000