sábado, 22 de fevereiro de 2014


                Mistérios


                                                                                    (para Marcus, seu sorriso eventual)


Arrumar malas mais uma vez
arrumar, sentir o canto, o arrulhar
o novo rumo de objetos sós
precários, movidos de um lado para outro
repartidos, classificados, ensacados
coisas que buscam seu lugar
buscam como se seres fossem
pensantes:
- caber num espaço exíguo, a repartição dos pães
ao contrário
(todo o vivido em algum tempo, lugar
 na verdade, tempos multiplicados
 lugares exponenciais)
tudo
que se retorce, aperta, ensaca
para caber
numa mala


Gota


Folha de forma perfeita
cai
De um verde verde
não se retrai
(é puro abandono)
vem ao chão
sem ser este o tempo
da queda
(a estação não é o outono)
Uma  gota verde bordada
geometricamente
com amarelos veios
( teia )
A folha se abre em linhas
letras finas  desenham
o território da folha
escasso e aberto
(veredas esboçadas)
Aranha-folha
Artista
traça bifurcações repetidas
(destinos)
Tudo cabe no espaço da folha
 caída

pousada na perna

terça-feira, 4 de fevereiro de 2014

                A thematic selection of texts from the books:
Personagem Possível (Possible character), 1984; Matéria sem nome (Nameless matter), 1986; Falas (Talks), 1988; Este fruto outro (This other fruit), 1995; The ideogram of sleep – between East and West, 2005; Coitus with reality, 2011.


TIME


I

the lion in the middle of the night
what tells me the body
the night and the souls
how to be faithful to stories and tell them simple?
To say:
the lion that invades us in the middle of the night
is dead
To dream:
it escaped amid the trees
and through the shadows
screamed

(what shows me the body is time)


II

What surrounds me
is,  has been, elsewhere.
Nothing is immovable and everything is
so deeply.
The pain I feel has nothing to do
with the fate of  beings surrounding me
(if fate they have)
In the Book of Changes, one reads:
favorable to move forward
But what if remaining is moving forward?
The river waters have melted
Murky, are the gaze of time.


III

Same light
same angle
equality of inequality


 IV

The world is a valley and
earth raises itself again
upon waters
Come ashore and breathe
your forsaken gods await
Tear your old garments
and search for your place
(a heart needs the cavity of the soul)



SPACES


I  Brazil

And then my sweetheart said
In São Paulo 3,364 cows are eaten
per day
I swallowed in silence and picture
the procession of cows
the quartering of those animals
while I thought how many
of those 19,800,000 mouths in São Paulo
would chew that meat
But my baby comforted me:
there are also 490,000 chickens
(looking through the window
 thought of India, cows wandering)
I wonder what Mário Quintana
would say about this -
maybe would ask about the air
air filling empty stomachs
Or maybe say something poetic
about  revolutions



II Italy


the monuments
constructions that struggle
to evoke
to simulate
the splendor of life
the movement of waters
the sound
the rumor
of life
in a lion´s mouth
fish
nymphs
gods
centaurs
all silent
all deaf
afflictive
in the effort
in the effort to celebrate

life


III  China



China. Terracota army. Qin Shi Huang´s army telling of the First Emperor´s fear of death. Powerful elixirs, impossible alchemyes. From north, south, east and west pieces and more pieces of warriors. Pieces of the impossible desire. What substantiates possible eternity? The unleashed arm, waiting for the enemy, armed. The isolated face on the Olympic dinghill, forever himself. The Emperor cannot be immortal. Horses forever. Warriors forever. All telling of her smile – that ubiquitous, omniscient lady – all exhausted of being reborn with every look.

*
There was once the lonely dance of an intruder in the Forbidden City. In
the Hall of Supreme Harmony, between columns and reflections, the (silent)
question echoed: does truth exist? The proscribed truth danced, in the night
of vast spaces in the center of the center of the Empire. The site of the throne sheltered the senseless dance. Who was he? A philosopher. A lunatic. An anarchist. Someone carrying a selection of world signs, emerging in the topography of the sacred. Dagger. Knife. Matches. Coins. Sculpted jade. Fan. Snuffbox. Coat. Towel. Stick. The picture engraved in jade confirming protection. A purple pebble – also among the objects – was pure light shedding on the body, the footsteps of the fool, of the god. He was trialed and beheaded, though no one ever knew (or understood) who he was.


*

Triptic for Chengde

There´s a last poem to be written.
I know of its existence, I can feel it
but the poem escapes among screams
of peacocks, the anguish in those screams
interrupting  calm sourroundings.
Counterpoint. Collage. Realism.
Didn´t know about a coherence
between feet and sound of peacocks
Their bodies are something else
Nothing in this Xanadu garden addresses
pain, only innocence in the voice
of  peacocks.

Mountains and hills, hills and mountains
Profiles of land elevations in shades
of gray. Chengde. Jehol. Chentze. Xanadu.
Welles quotes Marco Polo, Kublai Khan
Not to mention Kangxi, Qialong
the poet emperors. Kangxi wrote:
Near, far, spring sounds.                                                                          
Lost today are the stories of those
courts. Esoterism. Philosophy.
Thirst for comprehension
repeated impositions
Gods from eight temples accumulate
dust
and keep on smiling
discreet, meek.
Poor us,
constantly moving –
tireless visitors.
Those mountains
like gods
watch us maternally

Elevations in Qing ceilings repeat
slight mountain curves
Cutouts duplicating, strict
reproduction of nature. Chinese
logic in painting, building -
the search for  microcosm approaching
reporting unfathomable cosmos.
Today  architecture is another, no longer
Narcissus reflected in water
Only  music returns  the same
An ancient flute rebuilds a world
in the hands, in the mouth of a man.
Near, far, time echoes.


*

On mattresses across the street, people rest, sleep. Anywhere, anytime, there are Chinese who sleep. Not onlyon  subways or  buses, in parked cars , but on top of piles of boxes, between one delivery and another; in rickshaws, waiting for a client; on park benches, at lunchtime; in the streets, on pieces of cardboard.  As if seizing any opportunity to surrender to  unconsciousness recover  energy , turn off the world´s urgency. On the way, in this hot summer night, moist, almost Amazonian, I watch again and again those bodies asleep, surrendered . Stone sculptures, slender buddhas oblivious of themselves and everything.
They all look alike, in a deep slumber.  The sleep ideogram is composed by the idea/image of a forest  a forest that is not in land, but in the heights  and the idea/image of the night.  Woods growing in the air, overnight.  Sleep. The sound of fans. Bamboos. I want the sleep of the Chinese, a pure dive,  silent withdrawal beyond. An almost mineral beyond.




IV Argentina


A Café at Tribunales  
As if there the city
was at last itself
The city unfolding minimal and
excessive, retold and escaping
and from the streets reemerging silenced voices
taking shape, faces,
huge, granulated. Themselves.
As if in my arms nestled recovered bodies
whispered in every corner
multiplying
As if in the whole city  names
were being reborn

(me, spelling sleepless)


 *

National Library
From top, from bottom, this world
where to look from?
A world filled with eyes looks at me
with the sound of a bird:
 bem-te-vi/kyskadee (I have seen The)                               
The world´s endlessness, thus, cut
by the sound of the young blind man´s cane
almost minimal, all closer.

World deep see
within deep see
(bem-te-vi/kyskadee I have seen The)



V Africa

In West Africa
some friends told me
at a certain hour in the afternoon
after lunch
men and women of the people, poor, so often dirty
knock on doors
where foreign men and women rest
those who during the day approach that beautiful
exotic people
approach what their lives would be
study it
work for it maybe
take pictures of it
At that afternoon hour
In the African silence I know
 to be disquieting, pregnant
men and women of that people
knock softly on foreign doors
bare footed
and say:
“C’est l’ amour qui bat”




VOICES

I

The others, everywhere the others
Faces outside, everything out
everything other
I hold back – I stop,  wrap myself
amidst such otherness
A package of me, open and shut,
looking nonstop at pieces
of others as they discourse
Who knows why,  or where
- there, there where one reiterates the Other
the difference of the other -
I just imagine, without acting, I imagine
and listen and see and feel and smell
the hedgehog the other is
The whole other the hedgehog
here and elsewhere
Or  or
- either give up or give in
to the hedgehog within
this thing other
the same
And then and there
in other time
shaking the other, his weeds
proceeded, proceeding, proceed
dusting the sand of time
obsession of thought
With this thing other, this weapon,
Proceeded, proceeding, proceed
Sprawled in a non-other
Sprawling
Outside, within
every sound, everything
inside, deep inside
no shadow, no echo
as only
(as if all that-this was
only)
just
this simple thing
any of the
concrete things
surround-
ing

*

I don´t know m´am. yes, I may have lost my mind, possessed by the devil. maybe.
to do something like this you gotta be out of your mind, right? but
what I really know, m´am, is that I couldn´t take their crying anymore.
their hunger. the cold. that thing came through my ears even when
they didn´t ask for anything. Mother. I kept hearing their voices, nonstop.
I couldn´t sleep.  work, I can´t anymore. to see if I can get a few bucks, you
know. can´t even find a man anymore.  they felt cold, pain. I couldn´t stop
hearing them cough. when I got the chance to drink, they´d shake me,
 they wanted me to listen and speak. I didn´t know what to do with them.
but then, I always thought that this is not life, real life.
up there must be the real deal, right?

*
who knows, maybe I can, can´t I? if I want to. Is it just a matter of wanting
badly? I don´t know, I know I don´t know. sometimes I understand so much I almost come to think that I can, that I know. but no. what I can is keep watching the streets. others coming and going, for hours. I could. I can tell in detail things I´ve seen out there, long ago. No, no I don´t know exactly for how long. long ago.  when I knew exactly if what I began to tell was a dream or not. not now. now I look at you and suddenly I kind of pierce through you, my eyes stick on the front wall. like in the movies. you don´t matter any longer. your body filling with water,  growing bigger, brighter. fading out. until there´s only my eye left, stuck on that white wall.

*
I don´t think so. I couldn´t find a better job. I went to school two years. I don´t get used to fancy people´s houses. yeah, the drought is hard. the sun´s strong here, even when it rains. we pretend we´re home, where it´s even drier. one day I even got to like this sun burning on my head, I closed my eyes and saw the whole city. so small. no, never thought I´d do this job, but we get used to it, you know? and when you´re not working, the eyes keep looking for paper, trash. I felt once it was wrong to look, ´cause it was Sunday. but wasn´t I seeing the same? sometimes I find some pretty things. maybe someone lost it, didn´t throw it out. in my shack there´s one of these calendars with a saint, so beautiful she is. I don´t know how could they throw it out, it´s this year´s. but here they throw so much away, don´t they?







LOVE

I
he presses, presses. controls with difficulty the desire to keep doing it until expressing, transferring all to her body. the vehemence of the gesture, arms and legs immobilizing her. his mouth needs, wants, all the air in that body, where it enters not wanting to leave. if he could penetrate her until he trespasses her, annihilating the distance between them. she opens, makes room between her limbs and bones. his body seeks  a perfect fit,  absolute continuity, a thorough filling of her inside out. her body makes room for what she hears as a slurred speech over her, in her, making her grope, gasp, amidst silent attempts to find the subject the complement of this speech all verb.

II

his suit and tie bring her closer to the core of his desperation. of what
this core would be. the desperation condensed there in the tissues like
an appendix. desperation concentrated in one piece. a piece that one
dresses and undresses while the day is built - arriving home and being able
to naturally remove it. even knowing that it (the desperation that undresses)
is the reflection of something far beyond any longing. something that constitutes
 the shadow of a desire. a paralised movement. being able to see this explanation
restated outside oneself. outside, in the clothes thrown on a chair.

III

Today I reread Antigone in Portuguese. Even Antigone talks about joy. In an unlikely context, it talks about joy, I didn´t remember that. At night, in the theater, English subtitles, hearing Greek  as a sonorous song. I just heard your voice. What if joy could have your face? Don´t worry about what I said about the coming year. What do I know of the coming year? All that bothers me exists and  not.


IV

Fly, love,  fly,
Fly raging, fly

Who flies this verse
that awakes me?
Who flies
flies in the present -
I eye or I wind
driving a flight

Raging love, winged
Those who fly are not from this land
our  four-footed land
From which desert
to which desert, do they fligh?

But it is a song, I hear

Fly, lover,  fly,
Fly raging, fly

To whom I sing
this lullaby?
I call from the deep see
raging living being
capable of flying

Fly, lover,  fly,
Fly raging, fly


POETICS

I

It is not just a matter of comprehension. It is what I would have said if I had spoken.
but there was too much noise around and everyone seemed to have understood everything.
in their eyes, the shadow of the damned part could be seen, that which cannot be voiced,  heard nor composed. It was her who looked and understood those animals in jars, children with penises in their mouths. perhaps the damned was just language deprivation, she asked herself, as she took a glass of wine. to whom would she say what she had to say? the parabole she wove on what life seemed to be maybe would never come to be completely voiced.
 what would she do,  not expressing through language the understanding that invaded her.
 The sound of ambulances, sirens outside, and the possibility of yet another attack. In the other wing, though, exhibitions await her, an identifiable world: Matisse, Cézanne, Balthus, Vermeer. It is necessary. It was necessary to have been everywhere, through all circumstances, even beyond intelligence and transcription of experience.  It was a commitment to the world´s empiricism.

II


isolated
abducted
overlapped
commoditised
disqualified
inflated
rise
prevail
the words
are written
it is necessary to abduct memory before dawn
to raise it
cement it
build the city
to leave then
without food or clothes

eyes like stones
bread crumbs