Like Our Bodies' Imprint
Like Our Bodies' Imprint - meaning Summary
Vanishing Traces of Presence
The poem contemplates erasure and mortality: how human presence leaves no lasting mark, as the world resumes its indifferent order. The speaker imagines future moments when the beloved is absent, names reduced to bureaucratic lists, and familiar places that once mattered becoming hollow. Even languages and sensory memory fail to preserve or bridge that loss. It is a meditation on impermanence and the insufficiency of memory and language to hold what once was.
Read Complete AnalysesLike our bodies' imprint Not a sign will remain that we were in this place. The world closes behind us, The sand straightens itself. Dates are already in view In which you no longer exist, Already a wind blows clouds Which will not rain on us both. And your name is already in the passenger lists of ships, And in the registers of hotels, Whose names alone Deaden the heart. The three languages I know, All the colors in which I see and dream: None will help me.
TRANSLATED BY ASSIA GUTMANN
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