Cologne is an odd thing to build a poem on, because it is made to be personal and made to fade. That is why it works so well as the opening of "Presence". The first line leaves a scent hanging in the room, and the second repeats "still" for a pair of suit cuffs in a drawer. The repetition does quiet work. Each line insists that the person goes on, while the word "still" admits that he no longer does. The poem never says outright that the loved one has died, but "withering away" and the fossils later on point towards mourning. That is an inference from the imagery, though a hard one to avoid.
The speaker moves through the senses in an ordered way: smell, then touch and sight with the drawer, then hearing. "These walls murmur in my ears, / in your hoarse voice." The house becomes a kind of recording. The line break lets the voice arrive late, so the speaker hears a murmur first and recognises whose it is only afterwards. "Hoarse" is a small, exact detail that feels remembered rather than invented. Between the cuffs and the walls comes the tear: "as I open it , tear makes it way." The grammar here is rough, with a stray space, a missing article and "it" for "its". A reader can mentally smooth it into "a tear makes its way", but the bare word "tear" has a certain economy. It is a single tear, unannounced, and the slip fits a moment when the speaker's control loosens.
The diary brings the sharpest image. It describes the speaker "in every way", so the speaker is the subject of the beloved's writing, then "rose fossils hurriedly fall down". The phrase is a compact contradiction. A rose is the emblem of what lasts a season, and a fossil is what lasts millennia. "Hurriedly" adds a third time scale, the sudden drop of something pressed between pages when the book is opened. Judging by the imagery, these are dried flowers slipping out of the diary. They echo the falling tear and give the poem its central tension between what is fragile and what is preserved.
That tension is resolved, or at least named, in the last four lines. Until now the poem has been a list of objects. Here the speaker says "I was in love", the first verb in the past tense and the first admission of feeling. The final sentence is also the longest, four lines against the opening single line, and it feels like an exhale after short, held breaths. Its paradox is stated plainly: the writer "made me immortal / on his pages by withering / away himself." The flower imagery returns in "withering", so the rose fossils turn out to be a preview of the writer's own fate. The enjambment adds to the effect. The line ends on "withering", and "away himself" follows on a short last line that shrinks as the man does.
The poem has no regular rhyme or metre. It is free verse in plain, conversational language, which suits its domestic setting. Still, a faint sound-thread runs through it: "makes it way" in line three, "every way" in line six, "away" in line eleven. The tear finds a way, the diary describes the speaker in every way, and the writer goes away. Three small echoes carry the poem from grief, to being seen, to loss.
What makes "Presence" worth reading is that it refuses an easy comfort. Being immortalised in someone's writing sounds like a gift, but the poem sets it beside the cost, since the one who gave it is gone. The title is ironic in the same way, because the only presence left is made of absence: a smell, some cuffs, a voice in the walls, pages. The poem also quietly answers the diary. The speaker was written about, and now the speaker writes, so the exchange between lover and writer continues one-sidedly. That is a reading, not a fact, but it is one the poem invites.