A French saying sits above this English poem like a verdict already handed down: «On peut pas vivre d’amour et d’eau fraiche», roughly, "you can't live on love and fresh water." People use it to bring romantics back to earth, and the dropped "ne" makes it sound like a shrug. The poem never argues with it. It asks a quieter question: if love can't sustain a life, what do you do with it once it has ended? Its answer is that you can go on remembering while you let go. The poem's name, wordsforghosts, seems to fit that, since the poem addresses something no longer present, though the text itself tells us nothing more about who wrote it or when.
The opening is unsettled on purpose. "The weight of the rain cripples the name / of a person in a place": the rain is heavy enough to cripple a name, as if the name were something that could be bent and made to limp. The person and place stay unspecified, so the loss belongs to anyone. Then the syntax gives way. The speaker "swore never to forget or let" and the line breaks off, with "the silence" stranded far to the right. Only after a long run of "&" does the sentence land on "die, / disappear," so the thing we are told not to "let" happen waits at the end of a breathless list: silence, songs, "the long moments / of hands twisting time with bodies / entwined." The verb "twisting" is physical, as if time were a cloth being wrung out, and it echoes "entwined" a line later. The water imagery of the title is already present in that wringing, and in the rain.
Then the poem goes plain. "But all things move toward their end" is the shortest, flattest line in it, and it carries the same practical truth as the French proverb. The next line turns on "& yet": "time hasn't taken us completely, / so there's no need / to forget." The logic is gentle. Memory isn't framed as a duty or a failure, only as something permitted by what survives. Even so, the speaker doesn't cling: "even as we / let go of what once was." The "we" is worth noticing. It suggests two people still linked, or at least a speaker who won't make the loss a solitary one.
The final stanza turns to the moon, and the image holds the poem's idea in small. "Some nights we cannot see the moon, / but during others its / dignified light / repeats the silver nights." Moonlight is borrowed light, a reflection of the sun, and the verb "repeats" treats it as an echo, which is how memory behaves. "Dignified" is a surprising word for light. It suggests a past that returns without begging, so remembering doesn't have to be undignified or painful. Silver is followed by gold, "those golden mornings we spent / bathing, deluded / & content." The word "precluding" is odd there, since it normally means "preventing" and we might expect "preceding." Read literally, the silver nights shut out the golden mornings, which leaves a faint ache. Read as "leading up to," it sets night and morning in a single sequence. Either way the ending turns the title around, because the bathing recalls the "eau fraîche" and the lovers did live on love and water for a while. "Deluded" concedes the proverb's point, and "content" refuses to be embarrassed by it. Putting the two words side by side, joined by an ampersand, is the poem's most honest moment.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter. Its rhythm comes from line breaks, from the wide gaps that act as pauses or silences, and from the contrast between long, accumulating sentences and short, blunt ones. It also has soft sound patterns, like the long vowels of "songs" and "long" and the i-sounds in "silver," "dignified" and "light," which make the ending feel hushed.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it is wise without being bitter. It accepts that everything ends and that love isn't a livelihood, and it still insists that remembering isn't weakness.