The Biographer Carol Ann Duffy

Because you are dead,
I stand at your desk,
my fingers caressing the grooves in the wood
your initials made;
and I manage a quote,
echo one of your lines in the small, blue room
where and early daguerreotype shows you
excitedly staring out
from behind your face,
the thing that made you yourself
still visibly there
like a hood and a cloak of light.
The first four words that I write are your name.

I’m a passionate man
with a big advance
who’s loved your work since he was a boy;
but the night
I slept alone in your bed,
the end of a fire going out in the grate,
I came awake-
certain, had we ever met,
you wouldn’t have wanted me,
or needed me,
would barely have noticed me at all.
Guilt and rage
hardened me then,
and later I felt your dislike
chilling the air
as I drifted away.
Your wallpaper green and crimson and gold.