With grown-up clever hands
You do all the proper things
Only don’t stamp your heels:
Your heels
Are too high
For our promenade
Through a garden of lilies-of-the-valley
Embrace me. For this
I’ll treat you to a cigarette,
All right
You and I are like boy and girl cousins
And now you seem pleased to see me
How oddly light your words are
But it wouldn’t be proper to embrace you:
My cuffs are too long
For our masquerade
Phone. What if I blurt out I love you?
Translated by Daniel Weissbort