Nothing Follows

Dear Lin, Thy words have entered the silence beneath my verse, and I confess I know not how to answer such grace. To be read is kindness; to be understood, a rarer mercy; but to have another soul descend into what one has written and return bearing its hidden ember—this leaves me humbled beyond speech. 🙌 And pardon me, if these hurried offerings should sometimes fall short of thy measure. The quill, when it touches what the heart cannot contain, bleeds before it thinks; it pours what is felt before it remembers the laws, nuances, and formalities by which feeling is made to stand before the world. I fear I write first from the wound, and only afterwards remember the grammar of the wound. ✍️ If these poor lines have nevertheless found some dwelling in thee, then they have surpassed their maker; for perhaps a poem ceases to belong to the hand that writes it when another heart receives what that hand could only utter. 💕 Thy reading hath made that mystery dearer to me. And for such grace, I can offer only these six lines: When all the lamps of mortal hours are gone, And grief hath sealed the chambers of the heart, Some nameless flame keeps vigil before dawn, As though the lost still breathe within our heart; For what the grave receives, time cannot sever— The loved grow still within us, yet leave us never.

Cherished Alison, I am most deeply beholden to thee for so generous and discerning a reading. Thou hast touched the very wound whence these lines arose—the strange truth that absence may lay the world desolate, yet cannot unmake that which love hath once made eternal. 🙌 Thy reading of the closing couplet doth especially humble me; that its quiet metaphysical defiance should have found such true recognition in thee is a gift both to the poem and to its poet. ✨ I thank thee, most sincerely, for reading not merely the words, but that which lingered beyond them. Such kindness, once bestowed, is not lightly forgotten; it shall abide with me. 🌸