Parting is rarely tidy, and Carol Berge's poem knows it. Its speaker has been left, or has let someone go, and she casts the departing lover as Balboa, the Spanish explorer famous for sighting the Pacific. The title's "Let Us Say..." admits that this is a game of supposition, a way of turning a painful leaving into something grander and more distant. The comparison isn't historically tidy either. The lover sails "past Molokai," an island far from anything Balboa saw, so the conceit is clearly a figure of speech. Its effect is to make the departure sound like heroic discovery, and to leave the speaker as the one who stays behind and watches the horizon.
The poem's central idea is that words failed this relationship while the body did not. "After the words" is repeated like a refrain, and each time it points to a conversation that has ended and done damage. Judging by the imagery, those words hurt. The speaker has "repaired my lips / from their blood," as if she had bitten them to hold something back, or as if speech itself had drawn blood. Another failure is named in a flat, abstract phrase, "the inabilities," which is oddly bloodless beside the physical details around it. Against all this talk, the poem sets what the speaker still holds: "your bone sockets how they / rocked you over me," and later "Sockets, muscles of your back / under my hand still." The repetition of "sockets" is revealing. She remembers the lover as joints and muscle, the structural parts of a body, and that memory is more reliable than anything said. She even claims "No errors / in the way silence joins / or we rock."
The poem's construction supports this. It is free verse with no rhyme and no steady meter. The lines are short and cut off mid-thought: "After the words. After / you have gone naked." Enjambment keeps the reader tipping forward, much as the verb "pivots" in the opening suggests. "Only the missing you / pivots me" is a striking start. Absence is what turns her, the way a hinge or a hip turns, and so it prepares the poem's mixing of grief and the body. Tone shifts abruptly too. "Congratulating you on it all / bon voyage" is brittle, a social phrase pressed into service, and the cheerfulness sounds forced. It reads as someone trying to behave well while hurting.
Language is the poem's other running subject. It quotes Rilke, "without a tongue, / can conjure you at will," and then lets "tongue" drift between meanings. When the lover enters her, it is "tongue or magnificence," and the line holds speech, the mouth and the sexual act at once. The word that failed them in conversation returns as the thing that, in memory, lit her "rooms till now." The domestic image is gentle, and "till now" quietly admits that the light is fading.
The ending returns to the opening wish for courage, now sharper. "I wish you / courage, in any language, this / or whatever they speak where you go / without me." The sentence runs across four lines, slowly, and its last two words arrive like a door closing. She can no longer assume she will share a language with this person, and "without me" is the real subject of the wish. The courage she offers is generous, and it is also her own, since it is the courage to let go.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal of easy consolation. It doesn't blame the lover or sentimentalise the loss. It grants that talk can wound, that bodies can say what words can't, and that kindness and pain can sit in the same sentence. The grand explorer metaphor wears thin as the poem goes on, and what remains is the speaker's hand on a remembered back.