Nobody in Mary F. C. Pratt's "Reunion" can quite get the facts straight, and the poem is better for it. It opens with the speaker doubting her own memory ("Was it spring of 67 or 68") and then correcting herself with a reason ("68 because / you were out of the dorm"). That is how people talk when they rebuild the past together with an old friend. The "you" never answers, but the speaker keeps checking in: "didn't we," "Remember the bonfire?" The poem never states its setting, but the title and the closing lines suggest we are overhearing one half of a conversation at a reunion. It drifts from skipped classes and homemade beer to a friend's failed marriage, and lands on the speaker's sudden recognition that she is old.
The form copies the way memory behaves. The poem is one unbroken block with no rhyme and no regular metre. Its short, uneven lines read like speech, and the sentences ignore the line endings. Words are even split across lines ("brides- / maid," "dotted- / swiss"), so the reader keeps tripping forward, as if the thought has to be caught before it escapes. The grammar stumbles too. "The artist who made all those death masks only / we were still alive" seems to lose its footing halfway through. Whether the sentence is broken or just compressed, it sounds like someone starting a thought, getting distracted, and moving on. Fragments such as "Masks and class notes" and the lone "Maura" work like items fished out of a drawer.
The masks are the poem's central image, and the most layered. Death masks are made from the faces of the dead, but these were made from the living: "death masks only / we were still alive." The details are physical and slightly uneasy. Faces are "done in / plaster tape," and the plaster "heated up after awhile." Then comes the most compressed line in the poem: "Trusting somebody so you could breathe." The poem doesn't explain how the breathing worked. It just lets that one clause carry a whole idea of friendship. Then the masks burn in the bonfire with the class notes, so the evidence of that year is gone and only memory is left, and memory exaggerates. "Hundreds of masks, or at least dozens," the speaker says, backing down from her own claim. When she says "I'd like / to have one now, that plain white," the wish is hard to pin down. A blank white face might stand for youth before it was marked by time, or for a chance to see herself as she was. Under a blacklight, which the bathroom had, white plaster would glow.
The poem's sharpest irony is about names. "I can't / remember her name," the speaker says of the artist Phil married. A few lines later the name arrives, "Maura," as if it had been waiting nearby, and she repeats it as though testing it. By the end we learn that she was one of the bridesmaids, in a "pink dotted- / swiss" dress she "tossed after / the wedding." The dress is thrown away like the masks are burned. There is a dry, throwaway line about empire waists: "so we all looked / pregnant. I guess some of us were." The casual "I guess" hints at whole lives that the poem is too quick-moving, or too honest, to stop and describe. Even the gossip ("we all knew they wouldn't [last] the way / she fooled around") carries a small guilt, because the woman being judged is someone whose name the speaker lost.
The ending doesn't shout. "Funny" appears twice, and it is the kind of word people use when something hurts too much to call by its real name. "Funny you can be someone's bridesmaid / and lose touch and even forget / her name." The last sentence turns on a quiet echo: "old friends" becomes "we're old." Friendship and age are packed into the same phrase, and the realisation arrives "all of a sudden," in the present tense, after all that muddled past.
The poem is significant because it avoids grand statements about time. It gives us a half-remembered party, a dress, a name and some plaster faces, and trusts us to feel what is missing. The speaker is amused, a little embarrassed and a little lost, and the plain, chatty voice makes the loss land harder than an elegy would.