Picking up green bottle-ends and golden shells
on the beach may be an innocent act, full of beauty
for the walker who uses his eyes. But it can also be
a treacherous episode, if your wandering thoughts frame
an alien face, unknown to the bodies that are yours
and which concern you.
But that does not make less beautiful or strange your objets trouvés,
stored in the tubular glass belly of your hope.
Now, the figures you see when you rub your eyes
are green snow-crystals, a negative looked at through the microscope
of a hurricane's eye. Your life like a drawing
where you see two faces: an old woman and, afterwards, the woman when young;
a rabbit if you look at it with the left eye (and this is love
entirely): if with the right, a duckling's beak aimed
directly at the open heart of a patient in theatre.
Even so, although we stayed on the edge, we were afraid
of the lorries back-firing.
Today, a calm mind sees how past and future rush by
haughty and utterly opposed. Let us not cease to thank the man
who painted it: spring, the present, the dividing line.

Translated by Anna Crowe