The school lesson stayed with me;
its secret king, the leaf, eats the light,
makes sugar unrelentingly;
I slipped home, then, through the sun-foddered light
between trees, shrubs, grass,
being drawn up rough
to the light's invisible teats.

On my tongue the breaking leaf, the filler-word ‘green'
for phyll; your eyes, at noon in the reeds
accompanied by Pan's reed-pipe
piped through the opened car door to the two of us
mechanically at work in the grass,
our last attempt to lie together
without lying, to be green to each other again.

In light that fell, turned, resisted,
until sugar grew like the filler-word
‘feel' and I left you there:
with the car door open, and the pipes:
the grass stain drawn
so deep into my skirt, so green,
that all the light ran off it.

Translated by Robin Robertson