Most poems end with "with love" if they use the phrase at all. Elin Paulson's «With Love Still 1», dated 8/20/62, puts it in the title, as if the poem were the closing line of a letter that has no body. The speaker talks to an absent "you", and the poem never says who that is or exactly why they are apart. What it does show is how a connection survives when almost nothing is left to hold it up. Its central idea is the last line: "but better than nothing..."
The poem begins with doubt: "can i even begin / now at this time / when the time is gone and past / behind blue line?" The speaker seems to be writing too late, and the repeated word "time" makes the gap feel heavy. "Blue line" is hard to pin down. It could be a horizon, a boundary or a margin, and the poem doesn't say. Judging by the imagery that follows, blue matters here, because the next stretch of the poem gives the speaker "symbol of life / and of the sea / blue green / mother of pearl." The speaker never names the object, though a shell or a piece of jewellery would fit the description. What matters is that it is small, it is physical, and it is "with me." The phrase "after times and eternities / of changing and changes" sounds almost clumsy, but the clumsiness suits someone trying to say how much has shifted without being able to list it.
The form carries much of the feeling. There is no rhyme and almost no punctuation, and the speaker writes "i" in lower case. Slashes stand where full stops or line breaks might be ("in between/", "and worry/", "/ postcards from mexico"), so the poem reads like thoughts jotted down quickly, or like a message the speaker is afraid of overthinking. Small articles drop out too: "only now i have symbol of life", "lying in quiet pine box". The lines come out clipped and slightly breathless, as in a telegram or a note written in a hurry. The few sound patterns that appear are quiet ones, such as "changing and changes", and the hard, hollow "pine box," which settles into the line as heavily as the coffin it describes.
The family appears in an odd, offhand way. The grandmother "is sorry / and talks of you still," while the grandfather has died "also since". That "also" is ambiguous. It may mean the grandfather died after the "you" left, or it may hint that the "you" is gone in a more final way. The text doesn't settle it, and I wouldn't claim more than that. The image of him "lying in quiet pine box..." is stripped of ceremony, with only a plain material and a trailing ellipsis. Then the speaker breaks off with a casual "did i tell you?", the voice of someone chatting even while talking about death. Grief and small talk sit side by side, which is often how they appear in real life.
The postcards from Mexico, sent "now and then with no addresses," are the poem's most striking detail. They are contact without a way of answering, and a message with no return route. Even so, they have effects: the speaker is "surprised," the mother "happy / too." The parentheses around this reaction make it sound shy and tucked away. Then the voice of the "you" returns in "but what is that? as you say." It sounds like a dry, deflating question about whether such scraps really count. The speaker answers by quoting the verdict back, "but better than nothing..." and the ellipsis leaves the thought open.
That ending is why the poem stays with you. It doesn't promise reunion or offer a neat consolation. It lets love shrink to what is left: a shell or pendant, a grandmother's memories, an unsigned card. The word "still" in the title holds both meanings, that love continues and that it stays in place, unable to move forward. The poem's quiet achievement is that it makes such a small comfort feel genuine, and that it gives the reader the same incomplete letter the speaker is trying to finish.