I scanned my photograph from the first year
at primary school: crookedly cut fringe, chubby
little cheeks, a slightly bitten lip,

frighteningly trusting eyes. Gradually I move along
the contrast bar and out of the milky nothingness emerges
a shape that becomes real half way

down the scale, then sinks into the background again. Happy
is he who dies in this way. And now I'm looking in the mirror
and I have to agree to a few wrinkles that

weren't there not long ago (could they ever
have not been there?). So that's me, me again, all me,
including the acne scar, the hole in my tooth, and

one day, perhaps, the hole where a tooth has gone. Too much
of that me for me to take in, accept as my own.
Bearing in mind that we are only at the body.

Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones