Leslie (1944-2010)

She made a speedy exit out of this time-belt. I think she zoomed right up into the zone of bliss.
It's not impossible to imagine her gone because she has left such a strong trace, not just on paper but in her face.  The luminous smile from a being more spirit than body.
Therefore, it's easy to imagine her still present.
She worked only at what was impossible and lanced the thin membrane between mind and time, as if at a loom with a spool of sun and a strip of cloud.
The loom was human suffering, and most recently the suffering of the world's children.

To devote your life to the impossible is to push the edges of perception and expression as far as they can go.
Once in a cafe in Cambridge, she and I talked about d—th and how there is no word for what follows from it. Therefore there is no condition called d—th.
In that sense d—th does not exist and that word, itself, could be discarded and replaced with the mundane word “gone”.  We agreed on this.
Where she has now gone seems inseparable from the place she was always describing in her poems, as if she were mapping it in advance, and this made it easier for her to go there though surely with tears, ours and hers.

Fanny Howe