Top floor Poem by Daniel Samoilovich

I'm afraid, you said, with no need
to explain of what.
I may have spoken of death
because I remember quotes, a couple
of writers in German,
an Italian proverb, it rhymed,
Horatius, Catulus, and who knows
what more. I remember speaking
without doubt, as if reading aloud,
or if somebody spoke of me
and withdrew from your sight
to think of another.
Our clothes scattered on the floor
look like eccentric corpses
reds, greens, greys, there
where a killer dropped them, and from
below, outside, we hear the skids
of tyres on the wet street.

Translated by Andrew Graham-Yooll