Absence by C.H. Sisson

Absence

by C.H. Sisson

Go back, or forward, to a time

When I am not here. What remains?

What is here is what I see,

For I trust visibility,

Find that I get wet when it rains

And think that sense and reason chime.

No sense, no reason. For the past,

The living stand in for the dead

And try to see what others saw,

Though disappearance is the law

For what is seen, and what is said,

Though cast in bronze, can never last.

And so one can imagine sand

Carried back by receding tides,

And yet not understand a word

The ocean said when it was heard.

The present never co-incides

With any past that comes to hand.

Go forward. I am here no more:

No word of mine can extricate

The listener from the cord that binds

Him in the twist of other minds.

Unheard before, and now too late,

My words have lost the flesh they wore.

I am not even silence, as

The rows on rows of marshalled dead

Who left no word they did not speak.

An echo that is faint and weak

Remembers me for what I said,

Happy to lose the man I was.