One life, unshared, has come to this:

you have studied people as
a biologist studies frogs, disassembled,
without ever having held truant breath
in any mysterious blindness to hear
their throaty summons under
any moon.        I have studied time,
and am left with browned images
of a girl leading children at the terminal
at Auschwitz, caught in the unselfconscious
gathering, into her wholly inadequate protection,
of a stranded infant, an orphan
                                of the flame.