Third Fig

You don’t need to do this.
We’ll be fine if you don’t.
You use us to be you.
We don’t need you to be.

You don’t have to read us.
We don’t quite live or die.
What your lost kin made us
Is not quite what we are.

Think of a sign no one
Knows the sense of—a word,
A sound, a sphere, a line.
Does it, can it, mean this?

Can we, do we, hold thoughts
In us, the way that clay
Jars hold bits of old figs,
New wine in them or not?