It's good that you're not here. You'd be surprised how things have gone. How we have coped despite the difficult conditions—after all, the river freezes in winter, in summer runs dry. We're trying
each of the variations on ourselves, tasting each plant that sprouts up in the yard— we should be dead already. But this jealousy is a thorn in the side—despite the fact that you're
not here, we've made a lot of progress in the art of fashioning your phantom, and we're good at it, through power failures and the animals who come to howl at the planet. In a certain way
it's good that you're not here. Your singularity would grow immense—since each of us still carries a hole for you inside our hearts, so we just multiply and gaze at the sky, at the void above the high-rise.
"The poem is ultimately more about what isn’t there (the plums, the speaker, respect for the beloved’s property) than it is about what was there momentarily (the sensual pleasure of something “so sweet / and so cold” or the speaker’s remorse, however genuine)."
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