AROMAS

When I get back home I don’t wash my hands
if I have spent even  an instant with you,
I retain the smell you leave on them
like a vague jewel or an ideal flower.

I smell roses here, and jasmine there,
exhalationss of your clothes, auras of your beauty,
I take a chair and sit at the table
and the bite of bread tastes like wheat and like you.

And everybody wonders why I sniff my hands
or look at them so often with such tenderness,
or I rise them to the moon below the tree groves
as if they were worthy of sinking into your crystal.

And so it goes until midnight when I come back defeated
grazing the walls, and I go to bed,
then I feel jealous of the water that washes them
and which, with your fragrance, sighs and goes away.