In Goethe's version of the Faust legend, Faust's pact with Mephistopheles turns on a wager: the devil wins his soul if Faust ever begs a passing moment to stay. Mike Stone's speaker makes that bargain look easy to break. "There are so many reasons / To stop and stay awhile," he says, and he would break the covenant "every moment I'm awake", meaning he would want every moment to last. Life is that sweet. The poem then asks what happens when the one who loves life so much has to leave it, and what he wants to leave behind.
The answer is a quiet, slightly startling wish. If the speaker goes "down that infinitely long path before you," then "you should know / I got my wish." Dying first becomes a wish granted rather than a loss. The poem soon admits why: "I don't know what / I'd do without you." The wish is tender, but it is also honest about its self-protection. The speaker cannot picture surviving the other person's death, so he asks to be spared it.
Between these two statements sits the poem's real subject, a marriage in which one partner speaks his love and the other doesn't. "You never told me I love you" is a strange sentence, as if the three words were an object the partner never handed over. The next line makes the gap clearer: "Whenever I said I love," trails off with its verb left hanging, and the replies shrink as they arrive: "yes or I know / Or nothing." The speaker's way of coping is to "lick my wounds / And spin another poem / Around another world." Wounded animal and web-spinning spider are both in that image, and it hints that the speaker is a writer whose answer to a lack of words is to make more of them. Judging by the poem, he is the one who trusts language, while his partner trusts something else.
That something else arrives in a list of fragments, and the form carries the argument. "Yet the pain in your eyes / When you thought you hurt me." "Your hand feeling for my hand / When we walked together." "Our three sons." "Our one bed." "The sandwiches." None of these has a verb. They are simply set down, one after another, until the sentence finally closes with "Are proof enough." The grammar withholds its conclusion just as the partner withheld the spoken phrase, and then the evidence outweighs the missing words. The details are deliberately small. The hand "feeling for" the other hand is tentative, almost shy, and "Our one bed" sets a single shared object against the three sons before it. Then "The sandwiches" lands as a plain domestic detail after the more solemn items. It risks bathos, but that is the point: love here is the daily making of lunch, not grand declaration.
The poem is free verse with no rhyme and almost no ornament. The opening, "Life is great / Life is sweet," has a childlike simplicity, and the near-chant of the two lines makes the later complexity hit harder. Line length does a lot of work. "But if I should go down that infinitely long path before you" is the longest line in the poem, so it stretches out like the path it describes, while the phrases around it are clipped. The refrain returns at the end with small changes. "But if I should go" becomes "So if I go", more certain and less hypothetical, and the full stop after "before you" leaves the sentence unfinished before "Then you should know / I got my wish" arrives as a separate fragment, like a last remark at a doorway.
The title ties it together. A covenant is a binding promise, and Faust's was a bargain with the devil. The covenant in this marriage has never been spoken aloud, yet the hand-holding, the bed and the sandwiches keep it. That is why the poem matters. It takes a grand literary myth about wanting time to stop and puts it beside a very ordinary way of loving, and it concludes that actions, not speeches, can be "proof enough."