Memory in «I remember…» works almost like a sense organ. The speaker doesn't recall December mornings so much as "taste the memory" of them, a small act of synesthesia that makes the past feel physical, something still on the tongue. The poem, signed with the name wordsforghosts, is a love poem in the past tense. Its central idea is that desire can outlast presence: what remains of a lover is not a grand event but a few repeated, ordinary moments, and these are enough to fill the whole poem.
I know nothing reliable about who wrote it or when, so I'll stay with the text. The pen name does fit the poem's mood, though. Words written "for ghosts" suggest an address to someone absent, and the poem never says outright that the person is gone. It lets the word "still" and the habitual "would" imply it. That is an inference, but the poem's grammar supports it. Nothing in it happens in the present except the remembering.
The structure is simple and carefully balanced. There are three stanzas of four, four, and three lines, and the last is shorter, as if memory is thinning out. The poem is in free verse with no end rhyme and no regular metre, so its music comes from smaller things. The short second line, "December mornings," slows the reader down, while the long fourth line, "was to stay with the warmth of your body," stretches out to its end, a form that matches the wish to stay put. The ending leans on sound too. "Slip," "fingertips," "skin" and "limbs" all share a quick, soft short *i*, so the closing images feel light and fleeting, like the touch they describe.
The two seasons set up a quiet contrast. In winter the speaker's whole desire is stillness: "all I ever wanted / was to stay." The cold outside makes the lover's body a refuge, and "all I ever wanted" is a lovely overstatement, the kind of absolute that only seems true inside a feeling. In summer the movement belongs to the other person, who "would rise, like a feline, from the bed." The word "feline" is more formal and elegant than "cat," and it gives the lover a sleek, unhurried grace. Winter is about holding on and summer is about watching, so the poem moves from touch toward looking.
The richest moment is the line "to describe the most perfect lines, / just by stretching your limbs." The verb "describe" can mean to draw or to write, and "lines" can mean the contours of a body or the lines of a poem. The lover becomes an artist without effort, tracing perfection in the air, and the speaker, by writing this poem, tries to trace the same lines back. The phrase "just by" adds a note of admiration, since this beauty is not performed, only lived.
The final stanza turns that looking into something close to worship. Sunlight moves "from a halo to fingertips," travelling downward from the head to the hands. The halo makes the lover almost saintly, and the verb "slip" is echoed by the line breaks, which let the sentence slide down the page. Then comes an ambiguity worth noticing: "fingertips / brushing against your skin." Whose fingertips are they? They could be made of light, but the sentence also allows them to be the speaker's own. Judging by the imagery, the light seems to become touch, so that a sunbeam stands in for a hand that is no longer there. The ampersand that opens the stanza adds to the effect. The "&" is casual and a little hurried, like a thought added in the margin because one more memory arrived before the first had finished.
The poem doesn't explain its loss, and that is part of its strength. The title's ellipsis, «I remember…», presents the poem as the continuation of an unfinished sentence, and memory is shown as open-ended and still going. What makes the poem worth reading is how much it gets from so little. It has two seasons, one simile and one shift from light to touch, and from these it builds a portrait that feels warm even though it is told from a distance. It suggests that people stay with us less as stories than as gestures, a stretch, a patch of sun, a morning we didn't want to leave.