Most lovely of the things I loved and lose: the sunlight;

          next, bright stars, the moon,

          ripe gourds, the fruit of apple trees, the pears.

                    —Praxilla (fl. 440 B.C.)

A lucky woman,

Praxilla, to have tasted

the cucumber missed more severely than gold.

And lucky, whoever learns there is only one loss,

the bracelets glinting heavy and warm on the wrist,

fastened there for the first time

by a lover’s hand,

and the lizard-cool fruit growing outside the door,

cobbled and rivered with all the green waters of earth.

Exiles, too, must know something

of how it will be, the ones who say not “I miss Paris”

but “Paris is missing me”—

For it is the other which stays, we who depart,

and any piece of it, even the smallest, would more than suffice.

As lifting a single silk thread, the whole cloth must come,

if the silk is strong.

And this love we bear things—

their coarse hide, the blown chaff of their scent—

this love is strong.