The Age of the Girls
The girls who were talking in the corner not long ago
are just now starting to get up
(grabbing jackets from the coatrack)
taking up their umbrellas again and a forgotten wallet
that the tallest comes to rescue
from the mess of cigarette butts touched with
cake cream and
lipstick. The middle of the day conveys the
age of the girls
certain
they have succeeded in quietly shattering
a chapter of their lives.
They dissolve toward the door
vestiges of voices that are no longer theirs
no longer catching my eye
(now drawn to the corner table that they left aligned
with the rest of the mess). Oh
how I envy the boy whose job it is to bus the table.
He barely notices how they let that moment
slip into the ether
he moves quickly to sweep the crumbs of that happiness
(not what’s strewn across the tabletop but
in that concentrated air:)
secret combinations
fleeting
fragments of echoes
(some syllable detached from
a ragged paragraph)
that you tilt your ear toward with a craving for time
as if it were the tip.
Translation from the Portuguese
