Hunger

Patricia Fargnoli

It is the gnawing（令人痛苦的） within the silence 

 of the deep body which is like 

 the pool a waterfall replenishes（补充，装满） 

 but can never fill. 

 The watery room of the body 

 and its voices who call and call 

 wanting something more, always more. 

Once in a dream, the trees in a peach orchard 

 called out saying: Here, this bright fruit, 

 hold its roundness in your palm, 

 and I held one, wanting 

 the others I could not hold, 

 as the light fell through the trees, 

 one cascade after another. 

Now, the wind from the hurricane 

 that veered out to sea, 

 and the hard rain blow through the space 

 where yesterday men felled the spruce（云杉）,

 its height and beauty, for no good reason. 

 Where it was, only emptiness remains, 

 and the stump（树桩） level with the ground. 

The wind finds its own place 

 and waits there holding its breath 

 for a moment, calling to no one, 

 surprising us by its stillness, 

 surprising even the rain which comes in 

 to my house through the untidy gardens 

 where it has been sending its life breath 

 over the dying mint and blood-red daylilies. 

Summer is dying and I grow closer 

 to the shadow moving toward me

 like the small spiders 

 that inhabit and hunt in the corners. 

 And the wind stirs, rattles（喋喋不休） the panels, 

 singing its own hunger, its own water song.