I waken and gather from the mirror that I wasn´t born yesterday. The thing is to buy time so that you can bear to lose everything you must. To give up an hour a day for doing anything by all the rules of the art: Iron your shirt. Learn a really difficult poem by heart. What is more pitiful than our constant leaving? As if we hadn´t been uprooted once and for all. I don´t try to tell myself I´m born anew each morning just because each day is as if newly born. But then, trees hardly dream of me as I do of them.

Forgive me for seeing your bones before your flesh your flesh before your dress and your dress before your floating gaze, for it´s December, and more naked than the horrible chicken that I took from the cooler bin and immediately dropped, as its thin blood suddenly trickled through the cellophane and down into my sleeve, are the trees, whose black structures pursue me like everything alive but reminiscent of death, and everything dead but seeming to live; math problems with seven variables, spiraling snailshells of poems, and cranes of the Nordhavn, which give in the wind while I fall asleep in your long limbs, but dream of highrises besieged by scaffolding and of scaffolding hung with thundering tarpaulins. Forgive my gaze, which flies over you like seasons alternately crowning you with the light of a caress and undressing you like a raw-cold rain; I don´t claim that this month´s austere treetrunks are any truer than downy leaves in May -- and besides, I´ve left truth to the young: For me it´s enough to say things as they are.

The things that were here before you died and the things that have come after:

To the former belong, first of all, your clothes, the jewelry and the photographs and the name of the woman you were named after and who also died young... But also a couple receipts, the arrangement of a certain corner in the living room, a shirt you ironed for me and which I keep carefully under my pile of shirts, certain pieces of music, and the mangy dog that still stands around smiling stupidly, as though you were here.

To the latter belong my new fountain pen, a well-known perfume on the skin of a woman I hardly even know and the new light bulbs I put in the bedroom lamp by whose light I read about you in every book I try to read.

The former remind me that you were, the latter that you no longer are.

It is the near indistinguishableness I find hardest to bear.