Absence

From The New Yorker, September 5, 1988.

Absence
by Abu Bakr al-Turtusi
Arabo-Analdusian poems, ninth-thirteenth centuries

I search the sky
What if by chance
I find up there
A star you see

Travellers pass
What if I ask
If one of them
Inhaled your fragrance

Wind on my face
I feel what if
By chance it might
Bring news of you

On roads I drift
Hearing song on song
What if by chance
One breathed your name

Face after face I meet
Only to look away
What if in one
I see Your beauty's trace