Autumn your bellringing, the apple of bright weeping.
It does not hurt—the boatman, pendulum, and carousel.
If you had been here—all would have been decided differently,
but who can search for you on the gypsum bottom, Odysseus.
Or follow the traces left of the black road,
only an end of yarn will knit consent into speech.
Let Penelope wait—thus spoke the gods,
and a circle of milk in a bowl, and the oven of a potter’s wheel.
If the cup is glued too, and the halves fit together
of an apple, of damp earth, of a page read,
and the trace of yesterday’s snow, and the ice of Christmas clay,
then all the same the shore and a seashell of sand will remain.
Translated by Gerald Janecek