When I wrote it I must have been twenty-two, living out of university and away from home for the first time.

My rooms were rented but not exactly a blur of sex, so that’s a lie (and not in the original). Hölderlin is coy about sex, the raunchiest he gets being ‘a longing to enter the unconfined.’

I was working in a suburb in West London and could have done my journey—two trains, a short walk and a bus—in my sleep, which is probably why it took until the last few weeks there for me to notice anything. Near my office, opposite St Anne’s Church, a bunch of flowers had been sellotaped to a lamppost. Up close, the petals were colourless. Underneath was a card with just an “x” on the inside, scrawled quickly and at an angle so that it could have either been a kiss or a cross.

Though named after ‘Mnemosyne’, the goddess of memory, Hölderlin’s poem is really about forgetting, or the failure to do so. Death is never far from the surface and, in the last section, a flurry of classical references bring it into focus: Hölderlin says tenderly that Achilles ist mein, before adding he ‘died by a fig tree’. The poignancy here derives from the way he addresses Achilles as a lover or close friend and emphasises—as a lover might—not how but where he died.

I thought that it was only later I had noticed the bunch of flowers, but this fragment suggests I might have recorded their existence at the time and simply absorbed them into the background haze of my commute.

Derrida argues against the kind of mourning that attempts to interiorise the lost object. We should respect the ‘infinite remove’ of the other, he says, and thus take up a form of impossible mourning which refuses to make the dead a part of ourselves, or to translate them into our voice.

This could be seen in connection with the fragment, which by its nature, being at a contextual (and often historical) remove, guards against full introjection. As a result, fragments can retain a vitality, an alterity, that wholly surviving texts do not.

In ‘Mnemosyne’, an unnamed hurt hovers behind the names of places: an Alpine meadow, the caves of Scamander, Mount Cithaeron. This is Hölderlin in mourning, unable either to forget or quite remember. Re-reading the email, I recalled my own act of refusal those years ago: on the last day of my job in West London, I had taken down the flowers and half-pulped card and replaced them. Instead of a cross or a kiss, I left a message.

the drift of those

unbroken waters taking me

to some pre-dawn

                               dreaming on

the far-off fruits of heaven

      my every want become

a longing to dissolve

                                  the days

gone missing in a blur

of rented rooms and sex

look neither ahead nor behind

but as a small boat on a lake

      be cradled through your days

what drew Achilles into war

or Ajax to the sea cave where he lies

      was holding to

      our paradox of faith

and on the roadside was a cross

taped to a railing above which

      flew a long trail of birds

they made such intimate designs

upon the air

                       I couldn’t help

but call back every path

I’d crossed or double-crossed

      to end up here

                             still stuck

under the same sky that I left

five years before

                             the smell

of ripe fruit from the grove next door

the neighbour’s daughter

                             dressed in red

I saw my love’s long hair blown back

and black as night and couldn’t bear

to think of all those pasts borne

      so suddenly

                          away

for my sister  my mother  my daughter

      my grief gone too soon