The Dead

The sea that breaks on the opposite shore throws up a cloud that spumes until the sand flats reabsorb it. There, one day, we jettisoned, on the iron coast, our hope, more gasping than the open sea—and the fertile abyss turns green as in the days that saw us among the living. Now that the north wind has flattened out the cloudy tangle of gravy-colored currents and headed them back to where they started, all around someone has hung on the limbs of the tree thicket fish nets that string along the path that goes down out of sight; faded nets that. dry in the late and cold touch of the light; and over them the thick blue crystal of the sky winks and slides toward a wave-lashed arc of horizon. More than seawrack dragged from the seething that uncovers us, our life moves against such stasis: and still it seethes in us, that one thing which one day stopped, resigned to its limits; among the strands that bind one branch to another, the heart struggles like a young marsh hen caught in the net's meshes; and motionless and migratory it holds us, an icy steadfastness. Thus maybe the dead too have an rest taken away from them in the ground; a force more pitiless than life itself pulls them away from there, and all around (shadows gnawed and swallowed by human memories) drives them to these shores, breaths without body or voice betrayed by the darkness; and their thwarted flights brush by us even now, so recently separated from us, so close still, and back in the sea's sieve go down... translated by Charles Wright