The poem opens with a bold, slightly unsettling claim: absence is "the truest life." The speaker then turns it inward, saying "I will be the cost / of having one." It reads as if living fully, or being someone at all, means eventually paying with your own disappearance. It's a heavy idea, stated plainly and without drama.
Then the poem shifts to something ordinary. The speaker goes for a walk and "walks the talk away," as though the thinking and the worrying can be shed with each step. By evening the air is "clear / after a little shower," and the short lines leave that image hanging in open space.
The mood moves from brooding to calm. The poem doesn't solve the thought about absence; it lets the walk and the washed evening ease it. The feeling is quiet acceptance, with a little relief in it. Judging by the imagery, the clearing weather mirrors the speaker's mind settling.