It seemed that you had spent some years abroad,
practicing yoga, until you had acquired
marvellous powers: the ability
to levitate, to vanish and reappear
at will, to pass unhindered through brick walls.
This last you demonstrated by breezing
straight into the door until your mouth
was on the far side, speaking from the next room.
Somehow this did not lessen my desire
to be near you, although the certainty
of remaining so was more than ever fleeting;
you could take off at any moment, or sink
slowly into the floor to escape a conversation
that had begun once more to bore you.
Sex would be non-existent, I imagined; a meeting
of the tangible with the intangible
to the delight of neither. You had passed
beyond my love, all need or sense of it.
Passed or remained. When I look back
into our real past, there is your puzzlement,
my willed obscurity; a kindness I did not
know how to accept; a coolness I could not.
Now you are expecting your first child
and, but for blind luck, I would not have known.
That you are real at present, that is all;
you have walked back miraculously through the wall.
* * *
You'd never guess I'd been writing about Coleridge for the past week...
Dominic
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