I saw the place from all angles, it was no longer a dream
but more like surrender: something inevitable, as one oracle said –
one’s death is already one’s own, and it’s been months now since I dreamt
of you at all, pushing your endless load up and up the same hill, only
to let it go, and we know what to think of him – but what of the stone?
Anyway your death no longer feels as though it belonged to me too
like it did when you first promised it, under the ring of beech trees,
next to the swan pond, rumoured to contain live strands of hepatitis,
and I skimmed my toes along its surface ruefully, and the park bowed
down to the edge of the water as if even land could be sorry (long shadows

cut against the green) and how impossible really that the body
should contain the soul, surely, no – the body could not
contain it after all. Soon the world would no longer contain you,
only the stone – and all I wanted was a window.