You don't like the cackling magpies nor the pigeons pecking one another at your feet. They disturb your balcony of roses, your music, and your thoughts of love.

Are you the one I loved, or, leaning over your face, was I simply fulfilling a kind of obscure duty: paying my tribute to beauty. Indebted to love, as to the soul, eternity or the heart, everything we are linked to by a very ancient pact (the very one of our birth) whose terms remain unknown to us, but which we may not betray in the slightest without erasing ourselves, reduced to the state of a ghost or a digestive tube.

Translated from the French by Dawn Cornelio