The Truth About Tigers

It feels like you are still with me,
Though I know you will never be again—
Never actually were, just an idea
To address the confusion of non-linear time.

How can I know you so well, tangible
As a tree to the touch—form and shape,
Though slightly hazy, murky around the edges?
I have photographs, proof of your existence,

Or proof that you never actually existed at all?
Pictures of memories that when lived
Were the same as now, the same as tomorrow.
It is and has always been only now.

The photos, I look at them now.
They are of now when they were taken.
An optical illusion, a trick of time and space,
A tracing of a line that is really a circle.
Gone but here.

And yet, at times, I miss you.
Is it silly to miss something that isn’t real?
Or perhaps reality isn’t in question.
But to miss something that is simultaneously gone,
Here, and yet to come.

Written in response to Sanaa’s challenge over at dVerse Poetics to write a poem of address over.

“So, what’s a poem of address, you ask? A poem of address is a poetic form that allows the poet to “speak” to a subject. Most of the time the subject doesn’t talk back because it’s a person who isn’t with the poet, or because the person is no longer living, or because the subject can’t talk back because it is an animal, a place, or a thing so this type of poem is usually in the form of a monologue.”

“For today’s Poetics, I would like you to write in the style of Maggie Smith and incorporate conversational mode of address in your poems. Pour out the first thought, the first thing that comes to mind and let the words take you forward.”