Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
There was a poem
you used to recite
about a man
who wasn't there.
You knew it by heart.
And I remember
the peculiar pleasure
you took in its absurdity,
the familiar cadence
of words you had carried
for longer than I had lived.
I wonder
if you ever imagined
that one day
I would carry them, too.
Not as you did.
Not with amusement.
But like a haunting.
Because now
there is a man
who wasn't there.
And I meet him
in the quietest moments.
In the space
between a thought
and the instinct
to tell you about it.
In the familiar shape
of a memory
that arrives
before I remember
what has happened.
In all the ordinary places
where absence
should not be
so terribly loud.
Sometimes
I forget.
Only for a moment.
Long enough
to think of something
you would have loved.
Long enough
to imagine your answer.
Long enough
for the world
to be as it was.
And then
I remember.
And you are gone
all over again.
I used to think
the saddest thing
about losing someone
would be their absence.
I never imagined
it would be
how often
they almost return.
How the mind
can summon a voice
with such unbearable clarity
that the silence afterward
feels like losing it
for the first time.
How a person
can be everywhere
except where
they are needed.
And now
that little poem
has become
a place I cannot leave.
Its words
follow me
through the days.
A man
who wasn't there.
A man
who isn't there.
A man
who will never
be there again.
And I think
of all the things
you might have left me,
how strange
that one of them
should be a poem
about someone
who did not exist.
Because you did.
You were here.
You had a voice
and a laugh
and a thousand little ways
of being alive.
And I would give
anything
to hear you recite
those foolish words
just once more.
I know
how the poem ends.
I have heard you
say it
a hundred times.
But I cannot
bring myself
to say it
the way you did.
Because yesterday
I met a man
who wasn't there.
And he wasn't there
again today.
And oh,
how I wish
he hadn't
gone away.
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Poetry by Britt Wolfe:
What happens when a poem that once made you smile becomes the very thing that haunts you? The Man Who Wasn't There is a deeply intimate and heartbreaking exploration of grief, memory, and the unbearable persistence of someone who is no longer here. Inspired by Hughes Mearns's Antigonish, it tells of a familiar verse transformed by loss, when words once spoken with amusement become a painful reminder of everything that can never return. It is a poem about the voices we can still hear, the people we almost find in ordinary moments, and the devastating distance between remembering someone and having them beside us. For anyone who has ever found themselves haunted not by a ghost, but by the absence of someone they would give anything to see again.