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.