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)