Conferences, schools, are so awful,
so full of stale coffee and sugar
that thought wanders:
God and his works are basic,
male and female
seven primary colours
three realms
and one sole commandment: Love one another.
I was terrified of marrying a man
not from the Railroad;
I wanted household goods made of iron
so they would last forever.
I figured it like this:
if the bed was made of iron and the pots and pans,
God would take care of the rest:
clouds, dreams, memory.
Besides, I was not going to die, and I’m still not,
because I’m crazy and escape like the four-o’clocks.
At every graveside I cry with one eye only.
With the other I irrigate the strip of dirt
where bleeding hearts, everlastings and immortelles
are born to endure insects,
cycle after cycle of sun and rain,
heat of candles, cold of forgetfulness.
Because life is made of iron
and never ends.
Mobiles
What a beautiful poem if I can write it.
There’s no shortage of tormented things,
farm produce awaiting transport,
and everything necessary:
I must make dinner.
Or supposedly ethical:
someone knocking at the gate –
Aunt Alzi hurries to the side yard to turn the panties
crotchside down on the grass.
An orange tree beginning to sprout:
a precious wildness presenting thorns,
miniature leaves, flowers whose petals
cluster in beads of sweet-smelling gold.
They explain the world as young chickens do,
perfect down to the nails, a plumed, living,
invincible delicateness
no man ever made with his hands.
Startled in bed with his hands over his ears,
the young man was saying: I can’t sleep; it’s the music from the bar,
that rooster of yours crowing at
all the wrong times. Not true. It’s because of life he can’t
sleep, because of the hum that life makes. He wants to
get married and can’t, his job is lousy, his pancreas a
lazy ingrate. I’m married and suffer as much.
The day goes by, the night, I step out of the shade and say:
This is all I want –
to sit in the sun until my hide is wrinkled. But the
sun, too, will disappear behind the hill, night
comes and passes over me; far from mirrors, I feed
dreams of fame and travel, extraordinary men
offering me necklaces, words
that can be eaten, they’re so sweet,
so warm, so corporeal.
The trellis sags with flowers,
I sleep a drunken sleep,
judging the beauty of the world negligible,
craving something that neither dies nor withers,
is neither tall nor distant,
nor avoids meeting my hard, ravenous look.
Unmoving beauty:
the face of God, which will kill my hunger.
FROM
The Pelican
(1987)
It is good for me that I have been afflicted.
PSALMS 119: 71
Fibrillations
Funeral or feast
no matter which
everything beating inside me
is desire.
O heart that never tires of the resonance of things,
I love, love you, love you,
sad as you are, O world,
O man so handsome that I’m paralysed.
I love you, I love you.
And with only one tongue,
one sense of pitch, imperfect.
I love you.
There’s a certain wild herb with jagged
fuzzy leaves –
I love you, I say, desperate
for a different word to come to my aid.
To the trembling grasses,
love is a breeze.
Lily-like
Lilies, lilies,
life is all mystery.
I ruin the lilies,
they confuse me.
They blanket the departed,
heaven’s flowerbeds
where virgins stroll.
Like heads of garlic,
waiting for November to make me suffer.
They grow thick, like people:
Easter lily, water lily, purple lily,
yellow lily – anti-lily –
lily of nothing, spirit of flower,
floral breath of the world,
unfinished thought of God
on this October afternoon I ask myself:
What are lilies for
but to torment me?
A black lily is impossible.
Innocent and voracious, lilies don’t exist
and all this talk is delirium.
The Mystical Rose
The first time
I was conscious of form,
I said to my mother:
‘Dona Armanda has a basket in her kitchen
where she keeps tomatoes and onions’
and so began fretting that even lovely things
don’t last forever,
until one day I wrote:
‘It was here in this room that my father died,
here that he wound the clock
and rested his elbows
on what he thought was a windowsill
but was the threshold of death.’
I saw that words grouped a certain way
made it possible to live without
the things they described,
my father was coming back, indestructible.
It was as if someone painted a picture
of Dona Armanda’s basket and said:
‘Now you can eat the fruit.’
There was order in the world
– where did it come from?
And why does order – which is joy itself,
and bathes in a different light
than the light of day –
make the soul sad?
We must protect the world
from time’s corrosion, we must cheat time itself.
And so I kept writing:
‘It was here in this room that my father died…
O Night, come on down,
your blackness can’t erase this memory.’
That was my first poem.
The Sphinx
Ofélia’s hair is as black
as the day she got married.
She has nine sons, minus the one
who’s a homosexual
and another who’s into drugs,
the rest are ‘normal’.
She changed her hairdo and got dentures
but kept her waistline
and that air of some-day-I’ll-be-happy,
as innocent and wicked as I am,
insisting on understanding
life – Ofélia’s and my own.
Even today she walked by in dress pants
on her way downtown.
The manacá blossoms were releasing their perfume
as if the world weren’t what it is.
Well, you’ll say to me. Well, I say. Well, well.
I don’t want to tell stories;
stories are the excrement of time.
What I want to say is that we’re eternal,
me, Ofélia, and the manacá.
The Transfer of the Body
I was in love with love
and waited for it beneath the trees,
virgin among lilies. I held fast.
; Now I see it was a dubious fire
I endured.
The same one endured by tough women
before me.
And it wasn’t the demons who gave me the halo
that so infuriated my mother.
Mother long dead,
poor mother,
her wedding dress a shroud,
and she didn’t have to be so pale,
and it didn’t save her to be so temperate.
It was all a mistake, ash
hawked as treasure.
What was in the box was nothing.
The soul, yes, was murky
and no one could see it.
God Does Not Reject the Work of His Hands
Useless, the baptism of the body,
the efforts of doctrine to consecrate us,
don’t eat, don’t drink, don’t wiggle your hips,
because these are not sins of the body.
The soul, yes, baptise it, confirm it,
expose it to The Imitation of Christ.
The body has no black holes,
only innocence and beauty,
so much so that God imitates us
and wants to marry His church
and declares that her ‘breasts
are like twin gazelles’.
Useless, the baptism of the body.
That which has laws obeys them.
The eyes will see God.
Object of Affection
What I have to tell you
is of such high order and so precious
that if I kept it to myself
it would feel like stealing:
the asshole is beautiful!
Make what you will of this gift.
As for me – grateful
to know this,
I feel not forgiveness but love.
Responsory
Saint Anthony,
please find my lost wallet,
you who are tireless,
there with God enjoying your just rewards.
A whole month’s pay is in that wallet,
plus my I.D.’s and a photo
of me, exhausted, a face
no one would look at twice
except for you, since even when you were alive
you had compassion for human anguish:
the disappearing embroidery needle,
boyfriend gone without a trace,
ship on the high seas,
money into thin air.
I have a shopping list, bills to pay,
dues for living on this tumultuous planet.
I promise I’ll light a fancy candle,
give a third of my paycheck
pray a third of the rosary,
intoning your praises, O Hammer of Heretics,
whose tongue remained fresh
among your bones, intact.
Servant of the Lord, please find my lost wallet
and if God doesn’t think this best for my soul
then teach me instead
to live like you,
like a poor wretch of God,
Amen!
Eternal Life
Half a century.
The weight of that word used to send me straight to bed.
No more. I’m gathering wisdom.
Alchemists aren’t law-breakers –
sure, they’re naive sometimes, like the saints,
believing in stones, fish seen in dreams,
signs written on the sky.
Where is God?
April is reborn out in the cosmos,
in the most perfect silence.
Inside and outside of me.
Sleeping Beauty
I’m happy – and the reason
secretly borders on humiliation,
because at fifty
I can no longer take a dance class,
choose a profession,
learn to swim like I should.
Meanwhile, I don’t know whether it’s because of this rain,
the air drawing winged ants out of the ground,
or because he’s come back
and turned everything archaic, like the stuff of the soul:
if you go to the meadow,
if you look at the sky,
those tart little fruits,
that tiny new star,
you know nothing has changed.
Papa is alive and coughing,
Mama’s cursing sweetly in the kitchen.
As soon as it’s dark I’ll go out and flirt.
What a good and orderly world!
Flirt with who?
My soul was born wed
to an invisible husband.
When he speaks, dew appears;
I sense his approach
because the grassess bow down.
I’m so attentive that I sleep
more each year.
I swear, under oath:
I’m eighteen. Not even.
Heraldry
What huge luxury to be poor by choice,
temptation to be God who has nothing,
immeasurable pride.
Which is why I’m reminded
that many will enter the Kingdom before me:
thieves, bad poets,
and, worse, the flunkeys who praise them.
I’m distressed by the thought
that kings belong in palaces
and workers in factories and warehouses.
A stiff sentence awaits
those who, like me,
are dazzled by a light so bright!
I know a bad line when I see one,
when it doesn’t come straggling
from the unknown margins of the soul.
Is it pride that possesses me
or joy – unrecognisable,
masquerading in rags?
All I know is it’s love that fuels
this wearisome task of searching for pearls,
tracing a millennial lineage in coats of arms.
No one knows how to talk about the poor.
The Birth of the Poem
What exists are things,
not words. That’s why
I’ll tirelessly listen as you recite poems in Bulgarian,
just as I’ll spend hours staring at mountains
or clouds.
Signs stand for words,
words stand for things,
things stand for nothing.
Understanding comes like rapture,
it’s the same as not understanding.
When my mother lay dying, even my weeping
contained a rainbow:
black will highlight my fair hair.
Granite, gravestone, crêpe –
beautiful things or beautiful words?
Marble, sun, cellar door.
Understanding steals me away from words and things
and flings me into the heart of poetry.
That’s why I write poems,
to hide what threatens my fatal weakness.
I refuse to believe that people invented languages,
it’s the Spirit driving me,
wanting to be adored.
He whispers this hymn in my ear:
buckets, brooms, debts, and fear,
the desire to see Jonathan and be condemned to hell.
I didn’t build the pyramids. I am God.
Two O’Clock in the Afternoon in Brazil
As dearly as I love life, I love this heat,
this metaphysical clarity,
this small miracle:
even a scorching sun can’t parch these silken petals,
innocent and calm as the young Maccabeans singing in the furnace.
It’s my own heart that’s suffering,
at two o’clock in the afternoon I need to pray.
Is it God who’s calling?
Is it His centrifical eye exerting its pull?
Life is short and still I haven’t found a ‘style’,
words like astrolabe divert me from my o
bligations.
The shape of a nose can possess me for weeks,
his sad way of closing his mouth.
Who do I love, after all?
Was I seduced by the Son of Man –
and now confuse stingy you,
conceited you,
with the One who wants me with him
moaning on his bed, his cross?
The European said he was stunned by how much sun we waste here.
Thank you, I replied, embarrassed by Carnaval,
Afro-Brazilian drumming, my own extravagant hips.
Is Jesus Bulgarian? Afghani? Dutch?
A Brazilian He’s not. He’s way foreign,
with his naked, perforated body,
begging for affection, just as I do.
We have folklore, like any country,
and songs dripping melancholy.
But how can I accept that we’re going to die?
And the peoples’ soul, what good is it?
Meat lockers are horrible
but it’s my job to poeticise them,
nothing is to escape redemption:
Jibóia Meats
Freshly cut
Prices sweet
I better pray some more, so I don’t feel foreign.
‘My God, my God, why hast Thou abandoned me?’
‘Tell me who You are and who I am.’
The Dark of Night
I’m singled out by flashes
embedded in half-sleep,
pre-dawn, Gethsemane hour.
These visions are raw and clear,
sometimes peaceful,
sometimes pure terror
without the bone structure
daylight provides.
The soul descends to hell,
death throws its banquet.
Until everyone else wakes up
and I can doze,
the devil eats his fill.
Not-God grazes on me.
Nigredo
Mostly, it’s at night, when the soul is vigilant
and an eye not of the body keeps watch.
God! I cry into the darkness,
God, O God!
But it’s not me crying out,