In Absentia

    for Miranda

You remember being taken

to the art gallery in Paisley

where you would stare up at

Dali’s Christ of St John.

I, in my parallel universe,

would stare up at

its copy,

on a bedroom wall.

And I like to think of us,

in our respective childhoods,

just once,

staring at the same picture –

you at the real thing, me at the reproduction –

at precisely the same moment,

with the same sense of awe,

invisibly connected.