Waiting Room

We no longer share a language.
Together we are waiting.
A chair,
a bench,
a window
through which the light in our room
falls
on our hands,
on our eyes and otherwise
on the floor.

Heal our eyes
so that we can again find the words,
so multi-colored, that I can say to you.

Ingeborg Bachmann, Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems, Peter Filkins (trad.), Charles Simic (intr.), Zephyr Press, 2006