We first met when your last breath
cooled in my palm like an egg;
you dead, and a thrush outside
sang it was morning.
I backed out of the room, feeling
the flowers freshen and shine in my arms.
Does love and the loss of love make time travellers of us all?
Who have we met at the final moment but a stranger whose extinction is literally out of this world’s words? So Duffy tries to find words and ways to grasp this weight of loneliness, and the words and ways lead back to the reanimation and recuperation of the lost figure. Where can death take us but backwards to the resurrection of the beloved? And says Duffy here, death is marked by incongruities and anomalies all conspiring to agitate us into some unvisited place, beyond desolation or consolation. And yet not so