Here it is two degrees above,
Yet everyone is strolling out in furs.
Yesterday I waited for you again,
Warming my hands on the telephone receiver.
With a little brush I’ll paint my right eye,
And shield myself with lipstick like armor.
It seems too cold where you are now.
It seems the snow keeps coming far too often.
I’ve lined my eyelid with mother-of-pearl.
There. I am ready to leave the house.
A drop of perfume — and off I go
Into the world of men, unknown and other.
* * *
Life goes on by its own signs:
The snowy winter is beginning;
My hands remain, like ghosts at night,
So tender, and so unforgiven.
I live as if in rough draft still,
My hair unbrushed, my thoughts unchosen;
Foretold, assigned to me alone —
These gray-and-black, unending stripes.
I’ll trade my difficult words away,
To the last small coin, without remainder.
Unkissed, uncared for, left untouched —
My lips, so sweet, so full of danger.
* * *
A light plastic circle,
A café table,
With an eraser I rub out
My auto-da-fé.
In the gray of autumn,
A witches’ night,
Through wet little squares
To a hut with my love.
The circle keeps turning,
The race, the thrill,
The table is rocking —
The start is eternal.
* * *
I draw you again,
But this is not you,
And frantic with anger
I tear the sheets through.
A simple pencil,
My enemy in the fight;
The gouache lies shattered —
A challenge to fate.
How can one capture
The movement of a hand?!
I draw you again,
And the paper breaks again.
Beneath acrylic layers
Another face comes through.
I’ve studied everything,
But this is not you!
Helpless and paling,
I rip up the page.
I simply do not know
How to draw you.
* * *
My life is made of glass
And filled with illusory light.
All autumn long I waited
For Indian summer to arrive.
I flew inside my dreams,
I rushed, I wept, I suffered.
But yesterday the snow fell,
And again I waited, and again I dreamed.
My little glass world,
Where all is new, unsteady, brittle:
A watercolor stroke,
A laptop, a telephone receiver.
The cold road home,
Where the illusion of light has frozen.
What a pity that in winter
Indian summer never happens.
* * *
What remains on the fingers is the trace of touch,
What remains is wormwood’s bitter taste;
What remains is a gaze that is no longer there,
Like a languid, intoxicating, foreign blues.
What remains is a pale white line
Where lips may glide so easily;
What remains is the final half hour —
A gift or a curse for you and me.
On the lips remains the bend of shoulders,
On the hands the motion of lips stays on;
What remains is the whisper of midnight meetings,
What remains is farewell’s bitter wave.
