The colour thought is before language

“I want you and you are not here. I pause
in this garden, breathing the colour thought is
before language into still air. Even your name
is a pale ghost and, though I exhale it again
and again, it will not stay with me.”

from Miles Away by Carol Ann Duffy

As Andrea Slot says, “poems feel like visitors in the night”, or they may re-enact a visitation, their lines sounding like peculiar apparitions shaking us from lethargy, yet at the same time functioning as ways to reclaim the authenticity of the moment, away from any possible rewriting or manipulation of reality through memory. “The colour thought is before language” is for me this fleeting but vital thread making words possible. In this poem, Carol Ann Duffy works her way presence despite absence: I want you now, in this racing against memory erasing you and me together. This is what writing can be: not simply a replacement, or a replica of something we experienced, but the actual thing themselves, a pinnacle of intimacy where words do no longer represent the moment, but are the moment itself.

In a way, though celebrating the longing coming before language, here Duffy seems to celebrate the optimistic possibility of (re)creating something that was lost, something missing, not simply by summoning a ghost, but turning that filigree indentation they have left and that composed itself through your words into a solid thought, an actual shape coalescing beyond the apparition. Breath and bone standing before you, open wide and colorful, both meaning and substance.