Alone I spirit myself away
looking at the many flowers
born on the balcony,
certainly not thanks to me,
the gardener was the wind.
They skin me with precision,
their beauty sinks in
with the same noble knife
used by the missing.
I remember your laughter
whirling all around
when I confessed
that flowers frighten me.

Mine is a young pain,
it’ll take patience,
waiting as the bird
at the edge of a field
just barely sown.
I loved you with a human love, like
taking off one’s clothes at night and
putting them back on in the morning.
Now in these boundless days
I write you an invisible letter
to tell you there’s a wonderful path
a pearl that goes rolling fast
down a tree-lined avenue
towing lightness with it,
towing wakefulness.

I see the world
through your transparency,
I see its awful charms,
always faking itself opaque
then once again awake,
I see how we are hurt
by the lightness in this world.
Today the dead resemble the living
they don’t call they don’t miss me,
they dissipate into their lives
without wishing me close by.

(Translated by Brian Robert Moore)