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.