Translation

Though there's no such thing as a "self," I missed it—

the fiction of it and how I felt believing in it mildly

like a book an old love sent with an inscription

in his hand, whatever it meant,

After such knowledge, what forgiveness . . .

—the script of it like the way my self felt

learning German words by chance—Mitgefühl,

Unheimlichkeit—and the trailing off that happened

because I knew only the feelings, abstract

and international, like ghosts or connotations

lacking a grammar, a place to go:

this was the way my self felt when it started

falling apart: each piece of it clipped

from a garden vaguely remembered

by somebody unrecognizable—

such a strange bouquet that somebody sent

to nobody else, a syntax of blossoms.