For three days now it has been possible
reading the letters and looking at photographs,
to tell myself there is no difference
between this and your just being somewhere else.
I’ve been philosophising like a fool
supposed resemblances, absence apart:
memory, other minds and the rest of it.
Nothing resembles the fact that you are not.
Rarely knowing what I’d come up with next
or how it would turn out, I never did
see how you always got there first- and less
by dint of progress than by standing still.
Tonight we’re having our first conversation
since you died. It proceeds, as usual
but minus the element of surprise – the element
that was you. Have I caught up at last?
