Your death is entering its fifth year
just the passionate duration, it is said in our times, of a marriage.
I am as wedded to your corpse as I was ever to the fleshed man.
When now I leave England (for as briefly as can be arranged)
to visit expatriate Thérese in her German ballet
it is to your grave I leave and which, returning to England, I call home.
Note: Dachine Rainer, an American-born anglophile, died in 2000 aged 79 and is buried in Highgate Cemetery. Her tombstone describes her as a poet and an anarchist. EJB refers to the actor and sculptor E J Ballantine, with whom Rainer lived in Eaton Terrace, London and who was over 30 years her senior.