Brian Burch’s “It Is Only” opens with a contradiction that sets the poem’s emotional pitch: a “moment of forgotten joy” is reduced to “only,” yet it “lives none-the-less.” That tension between minimising and holding on runs through the entire poem. The speaker moves through a sparse landscape of trees and roads, grey walls and shadow, letters and remembered touch, searching for something durable in memory while gradually discovering that the past may be more invented than remembered.
The poem is built from short free-verse lines and irregular stanzas, so its pauses do most of the emotional work. “Trees / echo the road / and, / unlike the past, / there is no one waiting for me.” The isolated “and,” creates a hesitation inside the sentence, and the break after “past” forces a shift from one world to another. Trees echoing the road is a visual image—trees lining a path and repeating its curve—but it also suggests memory as echo, a repetition without an original presence. Unlike the past, the present contains no waiting figure. The speaker is alone with a landscape that mirrors but does not restore.
The wish for stability becomes explicit in the second stanza: “I turn to your memory of solace / and pain, needing something concrete as an anchor.” That phrase “solace / and pain” refuses to let memory be purely comforting. The speaker reaches for an anchor, a weight that holds a boat steady, but an anchor also drags and sinks. The image of fixity is already ambiguous. Immediately after, the poem closes in: “Walls / greyly shadow / and / take away / the light.” The unusual adverb “greyly” turns grey into a process, as if the walls are actively colouring the air. Light drains away in that room, leaving the speaker with less clarity, not more.
The most startling line comes next: “Your letter arked our pasts, protecting old lies / and unremembered betrayals.” The verb “arked” is not everyday English, and it carries the force of a word used precisely for its oddness. It suggests a vessel preserving something through a flood, or an arc bending the past into a particular shape. A letter, the supposedly concrete object the speaker might hold as evidence, does not simply record the past; it protects “old lies” and “unremembered betrayals.” That is an unsentimental turn. The thing used as an anchor is also a container for distortion. The poem lets “unremembered betrayals” hang at the end of the line, so the weight falls on what has been suppressed.
The final stanza strips the relationship down to touch and smile, then calls them “a myth.” The lineation matters: “But now / your touch / and / your smile / are a myth.” Each small phrase is isolated, as if the speaker is testing each one separately. “Myth” is not simply a synonym for something gone; a myth is a story that shapes belief even when it cannot be verified. By ending there, Burch suggests that the remembered person has become narrative rather than presence, powerful but no longer reliable. The poem’s significance lies in that honest ambivalence. It does not pretend that memory can anchor us safely, nor does it dismiss the need to try. Its halting lines and fading light dramatise a mind caught between holding on and seeing clearly—between a moment of forgotten joy that lives nonetheless and a touch that has already become a myth.