BUT IT’S NOT JUST THE CADAVER

But it’s not just the cadaver,
It’s not just that frightful person who’s no one,
That abysmal variation on the usual body,
That stranger who appears in the absence of the man we knew,
That gaping chasm between our seeing and our understanding—
It’s not just the cadaver that fills the soul with dread
And plants a silence in the bottom of the heart.
The everyday external things of the one who died
Also trouble the soul, and with a more poignant dread.
Even if they belonged to an enemy,
Who can look without nostalgia at the table where this enemy sat,
At the pen with which he wrote?
Who can see without sincere anguish
The coat in whose pockets the dead beggar kept his (now forever absent) hands,
The now horridly tidied-up toys of the dead child,
The rifle the hunter took with him when he vanished beyond every hill?
All of this suddenly weighs on my foreign comprehension,
And a death-sized nostalgia terrifies my soul.