You have placed signs of me everywhere. The stones I gave you on the shelf, in the shadow of the old photograph, the banded half-moon piece of agate, on a ribbon, between your breasts.

My room at dawn with its scattering of books and crumpled sheets, on the contrary, is as unadorned as it was at the beginning. Even the bouquet of grass that I placed for you in an empty pickle bottle has gone to rust. Yet, this this calf light at the window, which rubbed against me to awaken me, is the rose of your mouth.

Lying in grass, the spring chill barely kept out by the thin jacket in which we are half covered, half exposed, my arms wrapped around your waist, a shade of crabapple blossom,

I wonder if that boy, who gazed at the lumbering rainclouds through the thorny neredu tree, located in that faraway plateau country, many years ago ever even thought he would come to this season?

You are where my gaze begins to ache, I recognize the lazy murmur of August, the carmine of the sea.

Speak to me of cicadas, of that special sand, your bare feet, the grain of air.

Translated from Portuguese by Alexis Levitin