The French Prisoner

If only I could forget him, the Frenchman

I saw outside our quarters, creeping round

near daybreak in that density of garden

as if he'd almost grown into the ground.

He was just looking back, peering about him

to check that he was safe here and alone:

once he was sure, his plunder was all his!

Whatever chanced, he'd not be moving on.

He was already eating. He was wolfing

a pilfered turnip hidden in his rags.

Eating raw cattle feed. But he'd no sooner

swallowed a mouthful than it made him gag;

and the sweet food encountered on his tongue

delight and then disgust, as it might be

the unhappy and the happy, meeting in

their bodies' all-consuming ecstasy.

Only forget that body. . . Shoulder blades

trembling, and a hand all skin and bone,

the palm cramming his mouth in such a way

that it too seemed to feed in clinging on.

And then the furious and desperate shame

of organs galled with one another, forced

to tear from one another what should bind them

together in community at last.

The way his clumsy feet had been left out

of all that gibbering bestial joy; and how

they stood splayed out and paralyzed beneath

the body's torture and fierce rapture now.

And his look too—if I could forget that!

Retching, he went on gobbling as if driven

on and on, just to eat, no matter what,

anything, this or that, himself even.

Why go on? It turned out that he'd escaped

from the prison camp nearby—guards came for him.

I wander, as I did then in that garden,

among my garden shadows here at home.

"If only I could forget him, the Frenchman"—

I'm looking through my notes, I read one out,

and from my ears, my eyes, my mouth, the seething

memory boils over in his shout:

"I'm hungry!" And immediately I feel

the undying hunger which this wretched creature

has long since ceased to feel, for which there is

no mitigating nourishment in nature.

He feeds on me. More and more hungrily!

And I'm less and less sufficient, for my part.

Now he, who would have been contented once

with any kind of food, demands my heart.