One evening, I was late, with a towel, inadvertently, I knocked over a precious bottle
of perfume, which fell. The pieces were picked up, almost all of them right away,
others in the course of time, the extent of the findings gradually diminishing. After a
month, in a crack of the floor a transparent fragment of glass showed up, but
nobody picked it up.

More time went by, every time I went into the bathroom
I would see it and promise myself: "Before going out
I'll pick it up and throw it away,"
and while I went on with my business I kept an eye on it
so that it wouldn't go away or disappear
under the fringes of the carpet or something.

But bathrooms free your thoughts and when the moment came
to leave that room for another, another
memory took its place,
and the fragment stayed and in the last few days
it became an obsession, an obsession
regularly forgotten at the last moment.

And today I set my mind on it,
I concentrated more than yesterday
and more than the day before yesterday and I made it:
it was a gradual victory
of a memory over other memories.

I reached out my hand and surprisingly
the fragment offered no resistance:
it was docile, it let itself be picked up
as if all this time
it had been waiting for me, for my intervention.

Now, I don't know if out of pity, or a sense of duty
out of respect or love I've placed it
on the black desk, in front of me,
and while writing I contemplate it and pick up
its story of thing tied to mine,
and one apartment holds us both.

I am proud of having saved it
and it responds to light and sends out shy glows.
But I see the firmament in them and this night
I'll take it outside and stare at it,
for the moon is out, for the sky,
in the clear cobalt height, to return.

Translation: 2004, Gabriele Poole