Fragments

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I

after Yves Bonnefoy 

 

I step out into the snow, eyes shut.

It is summer. I don’t understand

 

why I’m alone.

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II

 

As I was born, the doctors uncertain

who would live,

my father fainted and fell

over my mother’s many-stitched belly

 

In her ears, 

my first frightened cries.

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III

 

We who sit at this table, we want something

        wordless from words.

In the bright brief breath 

        of our bodies, the hardly heard sound of it

 

at the tip of our tongues—

        the hunger, the listening.

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