matéria sem nome

                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