Not the hair that you or I have touched but the follicles all lovers hands have combed their fingers through, that number so much greater, say, than all the teeth from speechless mouths that now the fish and birds perceive as stream and garden pebbles. Not the breaths our mother exhaled since mud filled her father’s lungs at Amiens but all the breaths of children put to rest since Iphigenia’s sacrifice. Not the drops of blood that have fallen on all the battlefields of spring
