You, invisible, once again, I address.

I almost seem to welcome the distress

That puts me back in touch with you once more.

Remember how I called you ‘my old whore’

And how you laughed at that? – for, young or old,

Whores charge for love, even those with hearts of gold.

So you charged and I loved. And though you’d try

To justify the fact, I had to lie

On the same couch where other clients had lain.

Our play was serious, yet it was quite plain

That all the passion in it came from me.

You tricked me out of feeling solitary

By being others for me. That way, you

Were priest as well as healer, teacher too,

And father. My dead father. You are dead

They tell me, Graham. This is now my head

We talk in and I cannot turn to reach

The man behind the couch whose flights of speech

Lodged in my own, much as his garden birds

Merged with its foliage. Even now your words

Stay with me: I can hear your sympathy

And irritation, your lucidity

And warmth, your massive knowledge, your quiet laugh…

You had, framed in your hall, a photograph

I loved – it was of the Christ Pantocrator

From Vézelay, sculpted there above the door.

He gazed impassively into the minds

Of all who entered. Lapped by rushing winds,

Harried by turbulence, huge hands aflame,

He sits in judgement there. He is the same

In wrath or love, stern judge or gentle son.

His is the tranquil character of stone,

Hard and unmoving, sensuous, warmed by light,

Changeless, yet, suffering the chisel’s bite,

Yielding to what it images: the soul.

That was your business. In a different role –

Traveller, pilgrim, call it what you will –

You stare from a snap-shot. You don’t look ill

Exactly, but somehow edgy, as you half

Turn from the hands that clinched the photograph

Toward the horizon – anxious to be gone…

At least, so it would seem to anyone

Who knew this was the day before you died.

The camera might have caught you in mid-stride

There by the cliff’s edge, making for the sea,

Which, struck by light, almost transcendently

Blurs into sky in one pale silver blaze.

They found you in mid-stride, but with your gaze

Turned inward and your body on the ground

Still plunging out across Iona Sound

Toward the heave of mountain, it would seem,

Vision outpacing sense, Elijah’s team

Already harnessed to the chariot-shaft

And pawing the clouds.

                                      Where you were photographed

In fact was Staffa, but you went to die,

The next day, on Iona, where the sky

And land seem more akin, I’m told; for there

Beach, field and outcrop are a single layer

Laid thinly on the water, and the land’s

Transparent frailty timelessly withstands

The ocean’s grim authority. I know

Places like that. In them the spirit so

Permeates all the common world with thought

They bear the traces of a different sort

Of journey to one’s own. Unreconciled

To your departures, I was like a child

Who won’t believe his elders quite exist

Outside his orbit. You went south and east

As well as north, but always you returned –

As elders do. When, like a boy who’s learned,

I felt the strength to travel on my own,

You stabilised in my thought, settling like stone.

We’d meet at concerts. Do you recall that voice –

A pure soprano, firm yet tenuous –

We heard, in a bare chapel, make lament

Without vibrato or accompaniment

For a crusader love? We followed where

It gave at last on silence and thin air,

Ending as if intended to go on,

Lost in the space it filled.

                                        Where have you gone?

Where have you all gone, who are invisible?

Into the world of light? Or have you all

Turned inwards, melting into thought instead?

Or vanished? Graham, when I saw you dead,

And saw my mother dead, you were both mere

Things, as desks and chairs are things, no more

Life in you than in stolid wood that once

Stirred all through with the rich circumstance

Of wind and weather. Yet the leaves still sprout

In the mind’s branchings, tenderly reaching out

For light as the birds come, nestle there and stay.

I point to them. You comment. What you say

Is much like what you said, though in this way,

Somehow, you teach me more. I always knew

The richness of the mind, saw how it grew

Through all the human seasons, how it fed

On all the variousness outside the head;

And yet I never could accommodate

Its quirks, its weirder vagaries, the dull hate

Its warmest love includes, its sullen sluice

Of loathsome wants, the intermingled juice

Of painfullest secretions, how its strange

Flirtations with the arbitrary derange

And dissipate. Recoiling from that mess,

I looked instead for grace and shapeliness

And luminosity. So how much stranger

It now seems that, today, I feel less danger

From that – having looked into it with you –

Than I could have imagined. Stranger, too,

That the great world seems grander and the mind

Richer, more luminous – thought more refined

By being sieved through talk, more prone to form

For all those crazed departures from the norm.