Resemblance

Unable to know is a condition I’ve lived in
All my life; it is a poverty
Of imagination about the life of another.
This is, I think, the case with everyone.
It is because there is a silence that we
Are all of us forbidden to cross, not only
The silence that divides the dead from the living
But, antecedent to that, it is the silence
There is between the living and the living,
Unable to reach across that silence through
The baffling light there always is between us?
Among the living the body can do so sometimes,
But the mind, constricted, inhibited by its ancestral
Knowledge of final separation, holds back,
Unable to complete what it wanted to say.

-- Resemblance, David Ferry