From EM NOME DA LUZ (2022)
.
.
ETHICS
you open the windows or the door
and it is not only light that enters, but the chirring of birds,
the scent of rain, the dampness of grass.
it is merely an ordinary day, a day like any other,
you slept poorly, there’s a fallen object
which you return to its place
for this reason, something in you is ancestral and powerful,
laid bare,
as though you had reached the truth,
or the depth of a proverb
.
SERENDIPITY
i was thinking of Fernando Pessoa,
of you,
of how much love words demand of us,
of the mist over the Zambezi,
of the thunderstorms of May,
of the precise veining of each leaf
perfection is found while seeking something else—
the void, for example
today i recalled the firs of Cremona.
i again felt the hardness of the cold and the dread of the wind
reverberating through the forest
the void is also a form of serendipity:
you seek the poem and you shall find it
.
THE GYPSIES’ FIRE
to Catarina
.
in the south of Lanzarote, near Playa Blanca,
in a place they call Los Charcones,
i saw the closest thing on earth
to the moon
the landscape is covered in pyroclasts, in hardened ash,
in dust.
nothing survives here, save the creeping euphorbia
and one or another species of lizard
but at night this desert fills with bonfires,
with small scattered flames
between walls and tents
they say it’s the gypsies’ fire,
no one knows where they come from or where they go.
and i say blessed be they, for they exist
.
DAILY HYGIENE
things a man needs:
van Gogh’s twelve sunflowers,
the four Gospels,
pink soap
.
.
From EUTRAPELIA (2021)
.
CARNIVAL AND LENT, ACCORDING TO BRUEGEL
let us admit that life leads us
now to the right, now to the left
of that painting by Bruegel,
forcing us at times to strict observance of sorrow,
at other times to the bizarre idolatry of laughter
sing, my child, sing
you used to say at the porch entrance
and also that the apostles of melancholy
are, among sinners, the most fanatical
and the most terrible stiflers of the sun
.
THUNDERSTORM
at least this—
the lightning wallowing
in the sky,
cheering the night,
the thunder striking
against the door hinges,
the scent of dry earth
lifted by the fingers of rain
at least this—
to feel something awakened
within and for us,
like a piano’s vibrato
played late in the night,
just in time to save us
.
CASSIOPEIA
the precise place of night
is where the eyes alight and close.
sometimes they scream within,
but it is only a mistake
we all know that dreams are mute
and that screams, more often than not,
are nothing but stones in combustion
.
STILL LIFE WITH WHEAT, GRAPES, AND ECCLESIASTES
Un domingo, un cuaderno, unos versos.
Nunca, nada y nadie son lo mismo.
José Ángel Cilleruelo
.
you laid over everything the attentive scent of books,
that restless aroma which opens
our nostrils
and sweetens the unbearable still life
of Sunday afternoons
if we painted the portrait of ourselves,
the details would be missing,
the ripened light of grain, moist with wine,
in which Bruegel or Rembrandt
might well have aged us
in us, as in books, lives the insuperable
nostalgia of time
and so we wander through the city, among old bookstalls,
seeking a penance that does not exist,
loving a forgiveness that cannot be asked
From ONSTAGE REFLECTIONS (2011)
.
AT THE MEDIEVAL FAIR
jesters and dwarves, fire eaters
the freckled harlot, the innkeeper
any number of characters
an old fair, like our souls — beautiful from
memory
and how not to laugh at the beasts
braying of fright and perdition?
how not to gawk
in the section of tortures and machines that extort
the truth?
you and I eat bread and cheese
throw back beer with honey
into the bottom.
for old times’ sake
falconers and muleteers, two tonsure friars
a cross-eyed, a princess
.
THE HOUSE, THE BREATHING
just listen to the house breathing, from the door
the combustion of the silence, the volcanic bottom.
just listen, an insect burning in the light, the residual
euphoria of the broken pitcher, this sudden and violet
shudder of the windows.
just listen to how the house breathes, how similar to a harness.
sometimes my cold longing crumpling the bones
sometimes lost in the corridors, round
roundly revolting from the shoals and then
falling in the mouth and then falling on the bulb and
then on the burnt out filament of all the memories.
just listen: it is perfection from the door
the silence of my longing, it, with its eyes closed
with its mouth in the dark, my longing
just it, listen to it, just listen to it
.
KNICK-KNACKS
I ascended to hell, to the same kingdom with no end
of the brief and forgotten, to the same
silence of the beams, to a multitude of memories that
no one else can understand:
the same wide-range, intermittent torch,
the same darkness illuminating the cobwebs
the same old game of chess without the rooks
the dismantled train track
light ascends like alcohol when the hands repossess
the old bunny of a thousand nine hundred and
ninety well slept and dry nights
it is a terrible weapon the torch, opening cracks
like knives do when they open cracks
and the cracking noise of the beams becomes quiet and
the silence is a pit swirling in the veins
the attic is dangerously this, the place of the brief and
forgotten. one ascends and then returns again
without haste to the world of the living.
it burns us, indeed. the ethylic of the tears is pure alcohol
.
NOISE
Because I do not hope to turn again
T. S. Eliot
.
all said I did not say.
blackened lights fattening the eyes
as if early were already so late.
a window reclines over us
the rude and silent eyelid.
may it have been worth it. everything
.
READ ON THE STONES OF THE OLD CEMETERY
I am afoot with my vision
Walt Whitman
.
I read their names, the memory, the washed tombstone
vague synopses inscribed spelled backwards
the greenest moss amidst the chronology.
a great silence sweeps our hands — it seems
a lie — a great silence of something
unexplained, a great silence of birds and lime.
I exit and shrug, I pause upon common
facts, a glass of brandy, the same crumbling
corner of the tavern, the swelling of the accordion until
the above glint of the elms.
I read their former countenance of people, the exact
shape of ruin, years written backwards.
and then yes the longing comes, crushing us —
the very green moss, I said, eating away our name
that life is this. a penny-pincher
.
THE NOSE, IT HAS GOT A COLD
I have grown unaccustomed to old age, I apologise.
I can barely hear Haydn and food reminds me of
white walls and iron beds.
every eight hours everything repeats itself
a horrible decongestant syrup for the fever
the glass of water, the ointment, the tablets.
nurse, could you please
measure this torrent of aimless
words? I am much obliged.
it is the cold, I have delusions and chills.
the fever overcomes then the fingers slowly
and at last withdraws as an ambassador from
another country, returning home.
things repossess their clearness
medicine has won again.
the house is silent, filtered through the sunlight
the jar of flowers still there and everything
in its right place. seriously, what a sad
image
.
THE ACTOR LOOKS AT HIMSELF IN THE MIRROR
do not wait so long for me
I have no future
as past I did not have.
handsome I may be
however crude
no less than statue
nor better than sand.
like every creature
what I am I am no longer.
my hands burn with the cold
and I may already be dead
or too far.
do not wait so long for me
you do not know who you wait for
From DIAS DESIGUAIS (2005)
BEGINNING
even before the beginning
hunger, black, white, void
eye to eye with god
a vague impression asked
that I look in secret
so very close to things
.
NOTE
one day it happens — out on the road —
between the houses flowing past
and trees we’ve left behind:
ghosts we never quite believed in
drift into our gaze
and make the tears too heavy
we stop the car.
around us floats the cold indifference
of those who’ve never seen our faces
and whose faint, hollow stare
reminds us how useless leaving can be
we turn around,
pass the same old houses,
the same old trees —
cross paths with what we thought
was time’s forgotten thread
suddenly we’re birds, afraid
of solitude, and we ask:
to whom do we belong,
if not to those who love us?
.
IT WAS A PLAT
a shattered plate
will always make history:
it happened on a certain day —
she said things better left unsaid,
he replied in kind —
and the plate, once whole,
that humbly served them both
(the weakest of the three)
fell like lightning
and broke
it’s always this way:
someone must pay the price
but for history’s sake —
what difference can it make?
one more plate, one less?
she thinks it matters
he thinks the same.
so they come together
and, piece by piece,
rebuild the plate
that once served them both
From CONTRA O ESQUECIMENTO DAS MÃOS (2002)
I.
flesh gives way
and none is the oracle
but the sacred root of stone
the beginning and the end
dwell in its silence
and beyond what can be borne—
a voice of one’s own,
a soul of one’s own
.
II.
far off drifts the furtive foam
of water
the blood of origin spilling
into the fragile flower of the eyes
before time
we were forbidden fish
barred from the drift—
we only waited
.
III.
man is a burden, a stooped old figure
lying across the threshold
forgotten by others,
and by himself
night stepped into his path
and made him stop the turning of the world
man is ancient—
perhaps even a man unmoored from time:
his skin is sacking
his entrails are rags
in his extinguished mouth, a flower—
and inside it, a bird, nestled and asleep
