Your hat smelt of dead moths. Your flabby fingers
Betrayed that vulgar shopkeeping hook.
To want to touch your absence of a torso
With my own hands seemed a kind of joke.
But when my life lacked you my life lacked bread,
Though in your presence food grew rancid, cold,
As if an angel stretched the sky to spread
His knees apart and pissed into my world.
Translated by Yury Drobyshev and Carol Rumens