Excerpts from
Surroundings
By Henrik Nordbrandt
When we leave each other
When we leave each other, we also leave
all the places we have been together:
The neglected suburb with its smoke-stained houses
where we lived a month, towns where we spent a night
whose names we have forgotten, and stinking hotels in Asia
where we awoke occasionally in the heat of noon
feeling we had slept for a thousand and one years.
And all the tiny, nearly inaccessible mountain chapels
along the road from Athens to Delphi
where the oil lamps burn all through the summer night
we also leave when we leave each other.
Translated by Alexander Taylor
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