When I’m Gone: An Elegiac Poem on Memory, Absence, and Fading Light

A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.

— Emily Dickinson, “A Word.”

When I’m Gone

When I’m gone,
when your nights
are only somber solitudes,
not a trace of me anywhere—

you will hesitate
and knock on a door.

At the threshold, not a soul.
An empty space.

Nevertheless
you will ask for me.

“I want just a word,” you will say.
“An abstract word, perhaps,
a word he once illuminated.

“I learned this from him,
from the abstraction of him.

“I know it is just a game,
one of those games
we played at dusk, by the sea,

“when we were alive…”