What's the sky?
What are stars? Aren't they simply blue eyes?
What's the moon? Not an eyebrow bent like a bow?
Not your features which in my poem arise
Drawn in space, then left in the heavens to glow?

I'm drawing in space
Your ephemeral face
Out of stars, out of air - with the sunset's hues,
With the nightingale's trills - a parody on
A cry-baby poet deep in the blues.

I draw
Your ephemeral face out of nothing,
Out of space, out of time, out of birds' sparkling ways,
Out of sounds, out of lightning, rain, wind and snowflakes
And the most abstract dots in the galaxies' maze.

I can feel
Your soft skin drawn with paints out of air,
My eye's caught by the blue of your glance.
My picture smells of your scent - the scent
Of lilac dancing a moonlight dance.

I have put up the portrait
Here, in my attic
And beg it to stay, like a dream growing faint.
No, those are not poets who don't rob the heavens,
No painters who don't mix the stars in their paint.

What's the sky
If the stars are your eyes and the moon - your eyebrow,
The sunset - your lips floating vision-like by.
Your enormous, enormous ephemeral portrait
Drawn out of nothing in space
Is my sky!

Translated by Dorian Rottenberg