A poem, they say, can stimulate the imagination, a perspective allowing you to revisit and recreate life experiences as if one were in the moment again, however fleeting and ephemeral. Life, not as fiction, but instead, a life poetic. Not just any life poetic, but one of shared memories of you and i together.

I was sleeping, and you woke me
To walk on the chilled shore
Of a night with no memory,
Till your voice forsook my ear
Till your two hands withdrew
And I was empty of tears,
On the edge of a bricked and streeted sea
And a cold hill of stars.

It’s cold again. Desolate, alone, solitude, in exile as it were. Banished. A room, empty, filled with ghosts of the past. And in all honesty, a reluctance, a fear of lighting a fire temporary. A fire transient, one we both know that can’t and won’t stay.

If grief could burn out
Like a sunken coal,
The heart would rest quiet,
The unrent soul
Be still as a veil;

But I have watched all night
The fire grow silent,
The grey ash soft:
And I stir the stubborn flint
The flames have left,
And grief stirs, and the deft
Heart lies impotent

Left to wonder; to imagine; naked. What might have been. What perhaps might be. Perhaps.

If hands could free you, heart.
Where would you fly?
Far, beyond every part
Of earth this running sky
Makes desolate? Would you cross
City and hill and sea
If hands could set you free?

If only the heart could set me free.

Time, place and memories: dedicated to b;

I .. miss you so much.

(From: Philip Larkin, Collected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. pp. 26, 22, 28)