Winding from the northeast,
the most beloved of the winds
is aquiver with ardent spirit, to me,
and good sail for sailors.
Go and now greet
the lovely Garonne,
and Bordeaux’s gardens
where, ashore, a narrowing
becomes the path, plummets, and into
the stream the deep currents go, and above
an ennobled pair overlooks,
oaks and incandescent leaves.
It occurs to me still. But how
the wide summit lowers
into the elm woods, over the mill,
when in the courtyard a fig tree grows.
With celebratory strides go
brown women thereto,
on satin floors,
around March time,
when the likeness of night and day
cross, and onto slow footings,
heavy with golden dreams,
a taciturn breeze blows.
But brimful of
dark light brought to me,
one such pungent vessel,
with which I become calm, would
be sweet beneath the slumbering
shadows. No thing would
be soulless with
good, mortal thoughts. To be thus
a conversation, and to say
what is the heart’s opinion, it has to
hear of the days of love
and happenstance of deeds.
But where are the friends? Bellarmin
with the departed? To some,
shirking, the spring is unreachable,
it bespeaks, namely, riches
at sea; They, how painterly, gather
the beauty of the earth and are not
embarrassed of winged war, and
of living alone, yearlong, under
the defoliate mast, where the holidays shine
through, not the night, and stringed
vibrations and native dancing, in the city.

But now the men are
gone to the Indies
where the Dordogne,
on the windy peaks of bunchy mountains,
comes and brings the splendour
as far as sea. Garonne
parts ways with the river. It
takes and gives but remembrances at sea,
and love, too, intent as vigilant eyes.
But what remains,
the poets found.