Dust to Dust: A Poem on Absence, Memory & Loss

“The will [...] is merely a blind incessant impulse.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation

Dust to Dust

Many years ago, you disappeared one day
from the pages of this book.
At first,
many undertook the task of scouring
every sentence,  every word for you
in this language game—but you were nowhere
to be found. You had just vanished.

Some gave up their search soon enough; others, like me,
persevered, thinking that you always wanted to be the
same because, as many inferred, you had
willed that to be so, which would account for your extant
presence, sooner or later,
in one of these crumbling pages—
which, like everything else, in the end, turned to dust.

Dust to dust—that was you when I finally found you,
dispersed in this book.

It was a sad day indeed since, in the state in which
you were,

we realized that lovemaking like that would be impossible.