I invoked the Holy Spirit,
He said: suffer,
eat patiently
this bitterness,
because you have a mouth
and I don’t.
Take this tiny chalice,
this bread of gall and ash
untransformed.
It’s made of myrrh,
come, eat.
Salve Regina
Melancholia looms.
I want to be joyful
without needing to write,
without thinking
the labour of bees
and the flight of butterflies
must be recorded.
These women bemoaning their marriages –
I knew them years ago
as happy children.
That’s life, eh, Lord?
The skin on my face, the skin of my dreams –
are they really collapsing?
But that’s not what I’m here to announce –
I can see where these lines are going,
this is a poem, it has rhythm,
it answers to a higher order
and seems to be ignoring me.
Bad dreams arrive:
a house with only one door,
a jail-house,
high walls, narrow rooms.
I call after my husband but he’s gone,
he comes back a black man,
and indifferent.
The child who got lost
– or I allowed to get lost in me –
is a wolf-boy,
I discover him grunting,
beside an old black couple.
More blacks – I wonder why?
Why this dream?
I spend hours asking for help,
like a nun outside the convent,
I exhaust myself,
Devising silent spaces
in which to discover Your voice.
It’s fear that proclaims my love,
this cheerfulness is a recording.
The first Brazilian saint
prayed on behalf of a poor man:
‘Post-partum, Virgo Inviolata permansisti.
Dei Genitrix, intercede pro nobis.’
O Virgin,
Restore my soul to joy,
I too
hold my hand out for alms.
Buried Treasure
Farther away the closer it gets,
time outwits science.
This fossil is how many million years old?
The same age as my pain.
Love laughs at swagger,
men sleepless over their calculators.
The invisible enemy decks himself out
to keep me from saying what makes me eternal:
O world! I’ve loved you ever since
the unrebellious angels came on the job.
When caught in thoughts that lead nowhere,
salvation comes from saying: I adore You.
Knees on the earth, I adore You,
O gold-bearing mustard seed,
tiny heart in the entrails of minerals.
In mud, faeces, and suspicious secretions
I adore You, love You above all things.
Staccato
An ant stops me in my tracks,
‘What’s your hurry, miscreant, no time to help me?’
But it’s not her voice, it’s His,
intercepting me,
needy, needy God.
If I don’t say: I love You,
His pain will turn us both to ice.
Domus
Eyes set into the ridgepole,
the house peers down at the man.
Such sensitive, discerning walls,
now and then its ears tremble:
love one minute,
invective the next,
then fist-pounding panic.
God is touched
by the house the man has made,
God whose eyes peer down
from the ridgepole of the world.
The house begs mercy for its owner
and his fantasies of good fortune.
It seems impassive, but suffers.
The house is alive and speaks.
A Good Death
Dona Dirce was grieving for her daughter,
weeping real tears,
reaching for the coffee
her other daughter offered.
I watched Dona Dirce listen in amazement
to what Alzirinha was saying:
‘…and so the doctor expressly forbade me to –’
‘What’s the plate number on Artur’s pick-up?’
Alzirinha didn’t want any coffee cake, she was on a diet,
and was it possible that Artur hadn’t heard the news yet?
A freckle-faced teenager was visibly happy,
crying over her mother’s death.
I felt like crying, too,
for various other reasons,
but it was impossible there,
they were celebrating life
beneath contrite faces,
beneath mourning veils –
more than seven.
As each veil fell,
death covered herself up,
to protect us:
‘More coffee, anyone?’
Death was modest, a consoling companion,
practically a member of the family.
Lucinda had become a saint.
But I didn’t tell anyone, so as not to rain on their sadness.
Poem for a Girl Apprentice
It’s a desperate day
here in Divinópolis
but my patience will seduce
every last one.
The little girl insists
on tidying the kitchen,
she’s like an empress: ‘Out!’
The serious man attempts flattery:
‘I appreciate you even more without glasses.’
Hapless fellow.
The councilmen will applaud my remarks
about historical memory,
but if they were to excavate me they’d find nothing
except desire,
almost ungratefulness.
A pilgrimage is about to set out for Congonhas do Campo,
I want to join them,
get some dust under my nails.
‘Is there anything else that needs washing?’
Yes, my own soiled soul –
a grain of hope would wash it clean.
You can go play now, Beatriz.
On Love
In this way you are put to the test,
in the ashes of the obvious,
following behind a leaky truck,
when the man who asked for your hand
proclaims:
‘It’s carrying liquid.’
You’re a saint if you say nothing
and set your hand on his knee –
or the queen of hell if you bark:
No kidding, if it’s dripping –
what else would it be carrying?
Love is a painful sifting
that produces gold nuggets,
elixirs of long life;
from its little plot of land
springs the tree of perpetual youth.
It’s like gardening,
practically immoral to enjoy
the fumes of manure,
a half-good bad smell
(as the boy said of the piglets in their pen).
Love is more than violent.
Portunhol
I’m trying to say
that the body of Your Spirit in the garden
is light without harshness.
Have I said it?
Rose and rosemary
only seem to differ.
A mirror is what I am,
and not always clouded;
those who see themselves in me
judge me merciful.
Understanding
is when the body of light escapes you
and a clarity remains, glowing,
it’s when you say:
Amazing! Such delicate weavings on their looms!
Computers know
when I write rose with a ‘z’,
they correct me like teachers.
I’m struck by an overwhelming desire
for pork rinds
and an entire bottle of wine,
life quivering somewhere inside
– only here between my legs, until today –
and I long for alabanza,
long to dance to castanets,
and to say all lovely and wrong:
‘I feel me this, too.’
No one can deny that God is love.
Nap with Flowers
Ofélia thinks a tempest
is a rainstorm with a slow tempo.
It’s back, the little taptapping
noise in my ear.
Calling someone a cow is an insult,
but only the word – cows are good.
I suffer from aristrocraticism,
me of all people,
born way out in Rusty Creek.
I invaded my son once,
if I ever do that again
At the schoolhouse door
one sick boy helps
another up the steps,
we humans are God’s crutches.
There’s no rest for us here
in exile,
building mobiles in the sand.
Roosters know,
they crow at all the wrong times
to hurry the day along,
newborns scream
god is god is god is
and then there are the dahlias
smelling of virginity and death.
The taptapping taps on,
but now it’s like a lullaby:
god is god is god is
Mediation Verging on a Poem
I pruned the rosebush at the perfect moment
and left town for days,
having learned once and for all
to wait biblically,
everything in its time.
One day I opened the window, and there it was
as I’d never seen it before,
studded
with buds,
some already with that pale rose
peeking out between sepals,
clusters of living jewels.
My bad back,
my disappointment with the limits of time,
my enormous effort to be understood –
all turned to dust
before this recurrent miracle.
The cyclical, perceptible roses
have made themselves marvelous.
No one can dissuade me
from what – beyond the structure of reason –
I knew all at once:
mercy is intact.
Billowing greed,
pummeling fists,
high-pitched fury –
nothing can hold back gold corollas
or – believe me – fragrance.
Because it’s springtime.
Mural
At the nest collecting eggs,
the woman
neither young nor old
is perfectly broken in.
The indecisive sun doesn’t cast
this expansive light,
it’s she who gives birth
to nature’s veiled radiance,
it’s her own delight
in having a family,
loving her agreeable routine.
She doesn’t know she knows
the perfect routine is God:
the hens lay their eggs,
she lays out her skirt,
the tree in due season
displays those rosy blossoms.
The woman doesn’t know she’s praying:
Lord, let nothing change.
Our Lady of Conception
I’m ten years old,
heading home
from school, from church,
from Helen Reis’ house, who knows,
but I’m definitely walking along a sandy path,
thinking: I’m going to be an artist.
I have one dress, one pair of shoes,
and one vision that I don’t recognise as poetic:
a papaya tree ripe with fruit beneath bright sun and sparrows.
It would be mine forever, because it was good-without-end,
like rosebed, a fishhook word,
conveying heat, noontime, fangs –
an affliction, but only in tiny droplets
because the Virgin was crushing the devil
under her rosy heel.
All I did was bring my father his tinder and tobacco
and he said: ‘Wow! A girl worth her weight in gold!’
He could be unfair sometimes, but he’d also spend the whole afternoon
hunting for sabugueiro to cure my cough.
It looks like I’m about to get sad,
too listless even to wash greens,
tempted towards a stricter abstinence:
won’t eat, won’t talk, won’t laugh –
even if the pope dresses up like Carmen Miranda.
Virgin Mary! I’m nothing but time-fodder,
time is going to eat me up!
Help me birth this litter of voices, please
– if not, this connivance of shadows will kidnap me,
robbing my old outlook and ready passion.
Mater Dolorosa
This taffy
tastes like coconut, Mama.
Did you put coconut in it?
– Coconut nothing.
– Did you have a big party when you got married?
– Sure. Huge.
– What was it like?
– Nothing. We just got married.
– That’s all?
– Yup, that’s it.
One time we went on a picnic.
She made meatballs
for us to put on bread.
I remember the curve of the river
and sitting on the sand.
It was Sunday,
she wasn’t exhausted,
she patiently answered all my questions.
If heaven is simply that,
it will be perfect.
Chamberpot
At midnight, José dos Reis
– my secret boyfriend –
comes to serenade me.
Papa coughs
and rattles the chamberpot.
Lord, how embarrassing –
his little waterfall,
collards in the garden
icy with dew and fear.
I make like a dead saint.
My heaven is gothic
and on fire.
Invitational
Looking out through the rain I see
the steeple of Bom Jesus,
a few trees, houses,
and a desolation sweeps over me.
A whole life to arrive here
on this Sunday,
in this city without history
in this rain,
a harbinger of fear
but not lightning,
since it’s the gentle kind.
Is death unappealable?
Can there be there no alibi, no turn of events,
no unexpected bearer of good news?
Four boys duck into the bushes
and emerge smoking,
brushing stuff off their clothes.
A black woman climbs a ladder, an old man, too,
someone tosses trash
through a hole in the wall,
everything just as it was in nineteen hundred and seventy-six.
Why do we make mistakes?
I wanted to write seventeen hundred and ninety-six –
what threw me off the track?
There’s a smell in the air
which – to my surprise – no one else seems to notice,
metallic, a smell of iron that burns my nostrils.
Nothing makes any sense,
I want a big basin
to gather all the pieces and assemble them
once the visitors go home.
No one’s playing tricks, because there’s no one here,
it’s an old silent film,
the lips move but that’s it.
Hear me, Lord Jesus. Do I exist?
I haven’t dreamed in a long time – do I exist?
Answer me, take pity on me,
give me back my old joy, my comfortable fears,
not this, please no, I’m too weak.
Hear me, poor little me,
Our Lady of the Conception, come to my aid.
Christ’s Passion
In spite of the bowl
so white,
its porcelain
so fine,
there they sit at the bottom
exuding majesty,
existing only in the plural:
faeces.
If I muster even a grain
of happiness,
they pounce on me right away:
‘Lower your voice,
you’re not as powerful as you think.’
My martyrdom is bloodless
but pains just the same.
Application for Adoption
Oh, how I long for the days
when I had a mother,
wrinkled skin,
hair tied back,
knuckles like knots,
so old
she could almost be the mother of God
– if she weren’t such a sinner.
But this old woman is me,
my mother died young,
her eyes still bright,
face filled with fear.
Lord! I thought
children were the only ones called
orphans.
Woman at Nightfall
Dear God,
don’t punish me for saying
my life was so lovely!
We’re human,
our verbs have tenses,
they’re not like Yours,
eternal.