On this clear September day,
I think about you.
Your name unfolds like a soft yellow flower,
A golden lily from a grandma’s garden,
Drops of dew shine on its petals.

Your name carries over the
wide river,
Over its wooded edges.
As if someone called you from the other bank.

I see the sunny meadow and the hot
pine wood,
From above in flight,
As if in a dream,
Your name a carefree little bird,
With a yellow breast,
It flies above us,
As though someone called you, singsong,
From the flowering emptiness of
distant ravines.
The echo resounds in the burning-hot pines.

2.
Wild strawberry juice, smeared on
the skin,
Leaves bright bold strokes.
Crushed berries leave their long
scarlet trail,
Like comets,
On hips, shoulders, flanks,
Reddened palms
Can’t wipe them off.
Green and red were the colours of
that summer,
Green the colour of leaves and meadows,
summer’s defining colour,
Red its counterpart.
In that colour your body in a red
on the luxuriant grass
Takes on particular weight and
significance.
I rub the soft meadow clover
Between my fingers,
Breathe its sweet grassy smell.
Everything all around is warmed through
by the sun,
The berries and flowers striving to lavish
their scents;
The tip of my tongue trembles with
anticipation.
In winter I bracket off my body,
Cancel it out,
It lives like a feeble pallid mollusc in a
shell of warm clothes,

In summer though,
In summer it fills with torrid heat,
I look at my hands and hips as though I’ve
not seen them all winter,
Learn the changes they’ve
undergone this year,
(Or note with satisfaction that everything
has stayed as it was).
Everything has stayed as it was,
Here the same burning-hot pines
with their luxuriant crowns,
each standing alone,
In the distance the same barns with
their little houses,
The same fluffy ginger cat asleep on
the same overgrown roof,
But now you and I are here together,
Our hands woven together with bracelets
and blades of grass,
But the flesh calls, unhurriedly calls for something -
Relaxing in the apotheosis of summer,
It suggests a bath in the sunset-red river,
And lying afterwards under the crimson
sky on the red meadow that sweeps up
to the horizon itself,
Like a gigantic rose,
Lying under the lonely pine,
Lying, fingers on each other’s wrists,
Connected in this festival of
harvest, flesh, red, love.

5.
Jasmine, lilac, honeysuckle –
All the bushes where we kissed
came to life,
And stretched their floral lips
from the petals
Towards our own burning lips.
Everything was set up, decorated for
a wedding,
I looked at the jasmine, and knew
Where it comes from, this tradition
Of beautifying bride and groom
with flowers;

How obvious it is.
But, even if you had not been next to me,
I would not have wanted to kiss the flowers.
Flowers are too fragile, too defenceless:
How can you know their will?
How can a flower consent
To sweetness, affection, a kiss?
Seldom, so seldom, can you share a flower’s joy,
Of course, if such joy isn’t just an
anthropological construct.

1.
When I think about you,
I miss you,
I feel like a split, juice-run, ripe plum,
Its juice running along the palm, as
fingers close tight,
The sugary moisture leaves sweet,
dark streaks.

When I miss you,
My thoughts always turn back to our garden,
Where, on the dew-wet evening grass,
Or on the branches wizened in the shade,
Hide ripe, juicy plums,
Like dark-blue flames, lanterns
In the evening depths of the garden.

I love the velvet ebb of these fruit.
We were shaking the trees:
I pressed myself so close up to the trunk,
And when I held it tight, started to
push it away.
And you observed the rain of
loosened plums,
Remembering where they landed.
That one there went into the heart of a
rotting tree stump,
And that one rolled into a hollow,
And those—such a pity—flew into a
garden barrel.

There is nothing better than
gathering the ripe soft fruit

Together,
Arms crossing, each stretching after
our own choice.
In the evening, the dark-dark blue baskets
Will stand out on the porch,
Lavish with their choking, sweet aroma;
Luring the small clinging wasps.
When our house sinks completely
into darkness,
Surrounded by wizened, gnarled
garden trees
And the pines that rise up beyond them,
Rustling in the evening sky,
It seems the stars scatter down onto
our house,
Like ripe plums.

3.
At dawn—
Which, like the earliest yellow
springtime tulip,
Unfolds in our garden—
Big, blotched birds flock together
In a speckle of black and white
On the red-green currant bush,
Decorated with berries like
threaded beads.
They screech loudly, chatter,
Not guessing we hear them from the
bedroom,
From the first floor,
Through a gauzy curtain of sunshine.

The bush snarls with thrushes,
Rhythmically bending and throwing back
their heads,
To swallow the small, faceted berries.
When we were kids, we would
pretend
The berries were rainbow pearls,
And we the owners of countless treasures.
Decorating ourselves, with pleasure
swallowing them down,

As though we were swallowing gems
or precious stones –
The rich take gold leaf in their drinks—
With pleasure throwing back our heads,
like those big birds.

The bush is a bright folk painting now,
Birds of paradise on a wondrous tree,
Ablaze with life.
Once in May, I was planting seeds in the
garden,
And I looked back— behind me was a
beautiful, heavy cuckoo,
Plucking the planted seeds out of
the earth.
She seemed like a little redhead peacock,
It was the only time I saw her so close,
And did not just hear her lonely call in the
empty pinewood.

The bush rocks
Under the birds’ weight.
The uneaten berries
Fall around the plant onto the rich
black soil,
And lie there,
Like, lost one evening, a long red sash.