Following a River

I never met you in the flesh, dear friend.
I never met you where it doesn’t matter.
I met you here, where it does. But where
is here? The nowhere of a page?
It’s only a nominal page now. The medium
has changed back to light. A form of light,
anyway. That disembodied voice can pick up
and go without you. And now it does, since you
are gone. I mean the other you. That body
out of which you were so clearly writing a way.
You never wanted it, or at least not in the way
you wanted to be here. More generous,
less real. And you are. You are those things.
Those things go off in concentric rings
from the page, or the page’s children,
where we are now, here. They go off
from here and there, at first mere echoes
but later so much more.