Here are your keepsakes:
this mild blight of violets
falling uselessly on forgotten days and hours;
your name,
the persistent name your hand left behind on stones;
the familiar tree, its sound always green against the windowpane;
my childhood, so close,
in the very garden where the grass still grows,
where your head so often would suddenly
rest beside me in the thickets of darkness.
Everything’s still the same.
When, like now, standing at the far wall we call each other again:
everything’s still the same.
Here, pale adolescent, lies your territory:
damp grassland for your clandestine feet,
the sour taste of thistles, familiar frost at daybreak,
old old stories,
the earth where we were born, an identical mist hovering over our tears.
—Do you remember snow falling? So long ago now.
How your hair’s grown since then!
And yet you still wear its ephemeral flowers on your skin
and your forehead bends under the very same sky
so bright and dazzling.
Why, like a god to his world, do you have to come back bringing
a landscape I loved?
Do you still remember snow falling?
How alone your dwelling place would be today,
its iron bars and flowers behind useless walls!
Left behind, its youth resembles your body,
now it will miss your too obstinate silences,
your skin, as desolate as a country only visited by ash-grey petals
that have watched, for so long now, the inexhaustible patience of ants
going back and forth through their lonely ruins.
Wait, wait, my darling:
that’s not the cold face of the terrifying snow, not the face
of last night’s dream.
Listen once more, my darling, just once more:
the sand’s unmistakeable scratching on the fence,
grandmother’s cry,
the same loneliness, its absolute truth,
and this long future: staring at our hands till they grow old.