too cold to bear for more than a moment,
      over the basalt pebbles veined with quartz,
      and in the woods a bird pleadingly iterates
its song against the constant noise of the torrent,

and they lay down not far from a mound of snow
      dumped from the bridge above during the winter,
      from the Roman arch of the bridge, like a small glacier
shawled with filth and weeping slowly away now,

a hollow melted in it like the cave where immortal Parvati
      rubbed her own skin to make the jovial god,
      companion of her loneliness, but instead
they had only each other, the girl and the boy,

and you know what they did, but perhaps you have forgotten
      why they did it, faced with the water’s endlessness,
      the untranslatable grief of the bird’s paraphrase,
the nettle’s vivid green, or the veined stone;