Last Friday night I drove down to Sussex for an event at Emerson College and stayed one night in a nearby hotel. By an Orwellian coincidence I was put in Room 101.The walls were paper thin and I was kept awake, as I lay in my narrow single bed, by the muffled sounds of a couple making love in the next room. The experience heightened my sense of loss: I missed Chris’s physical presence desperately.
My body stirs with memories of you
and pleasures once upon a time we’d share,
in spring-time rapture like the leaping hare
and later under canvas, making love
on summer nights when side by side we’d lie
and chase the stars across the riven sky;
or waking in the chilly light of dawn
on autumn mornings half asleep in bed,
and of our bodies making one instead.
But now it’s winter and you are not here.
There is no comfort in your absent form,
nowhere to shelter from the coming storm.
Coming Home to Story 