I hear it in our embrace.
Maybe she doesn't yet know. But there are her eyes,
there are her eyes, so close to mine I can't see them,
and her other hand, the consenting hand,
playing, deaf, far-off, all on its own.
It is as though she were telling me, while we kiss,
as though with her lips the rumour came to me
of a hundred small sounds of goodbye:
the door, slamming, the footsteps crossing the gravel,
the broken howl of the dog, both of us brothers
abandoned as when summer is at an end.
She is going away, she will go. Blindly I immerse myself
in the bad weather of the body that has stayed behind.

Translated by Anna Crowe