Nel mezzo del cammin

Halfway there there was a stone
there was a stone halfway
there was a stone
halfway there there was a stone.

I’ll never forget that event
in the life of my worn-out retinas.
I’ll never forget how halfway there
there was a stone
there was a stone halfway there
halfway there there was a stone.




Heptagonal Poem

When I was born, one of the skewed
angels living in shadow said:
Go, Carlos! be gauche in life.

Houses peer at men
running after women.
If the afternoon weren’t so blue,
there’d be less desire.

The trolley goes by full of legs:
white legs black legs.
Why so many legs, asks my heart. My God.
But my eyes
don’t say a thing.

The man behind the mustache
is serious, simple and strong.
He almost never talks
to his few good friends,
the man behind the glasses, the mustache.

My God, why hast Thou forsaken me,
if Thou knew’st I was not God
if Thou knew’st I was weak.

World world vast world
if my name were Earl
it would rhyme,
but it wouldn’t be an answer.
World world vast world,
my heart is vaster.

I really shouldn’t tell you,
but that moon,
but this cognac,
they play hell with your feelings.




Dirty Hand

My hand’s dirty.
I need to cut it off.
Won’t help to wash it.
The water’s rotten.
Lathering won’t work, either.
The soap’s lousy.
My hand’s dirty, still
dirty after all these years.

At first it was hidden
in my trouser pocket,
and who knew?
People used to call me
at the tip of the gesture.
I went all stiff and by.
My hidden hand
spread its dark stain
all over my body.
I saw that using it and
hiding it were one.
It was the same nastiness.

Oh, so many nights
deep in my house
I washed this hand,
polished it, scoured it.
I wanted to turn it into
crystal or diamond
— at least there’d be some contrast —
or really just a
simple blank hand, even,
a clean human hand,
that you could hold
or lift to your mouth
or take another hand
in one of those moments
when two confess to something
without saying a word . . .
My incurable hand
opens dirty fingers.

And it’s nasty dirt, too;
it’s not dirt from the ground,
or dirt from coal,
or the scab on a sore,
or sweat on a shirt
when someone’s working.
It’s a sad dirt
from disease
and mortal disgust
on sickening skin.
It isn’t black dirt
— a pure, pure black
on some white, white thing.
It’s fuzzy dirt:
all fuzzy, muzzy, scuzzy.

There’s no point in taking
my ignoble dirty hand
off the table.
Quick, cut it off,
chop it into pieces,
throw it in the ocean!
With time and hope
and their mechanisms,
another, pure hand
— a transparent one — will come
and stick to my arm.




Any Little City

Houses among banana trees
women among orange trees
orchard love sing.

A man goes by slow.
A dog goes by slow.
A donkey goes by slow.
Slow . . . the windows peer.

Hell there’s nothin goin on.




Quadrille

João loved Teresa who loved Raimundo
who loved Maria who loved Joaquim who loved Lili
who didn’t love anybody.

João went to the States, Teresa went to a convent,
Raimundo died in an accident, Maria became an old maid.
Joaquim killed himself and Lili married J. Pinto Fernandes
who never was part of the story.




Literary Politics

The municipal poet
and the state poet
argue about who could take the federal poet.

While this is going on, the federal poet
pulls gold out of his nose.




Elegy 1938

You work without joy for a senile world
whose forms and actions give you no example at all.
Laboriously you rehearse universal gestures,
feel heat and cold, lack of money, hunger, sexual desire.

Heroes bloat the parks of the city you slog;
they extol virtue, deferment, sang-froid, conception.
On a foggy night, they open bronze umbrellas
or retire to books in sinister libraries.

You love the night for its annihilating power
and you know that when you sleep, problems exempt you from dying.
But your terrible awakening proves the existence of the Great Machine
and resets you so small before indecipherable palm trees.

You walk among the dead and talk with them
about times to come and spiritual matters.
Literature spoiled your best hours of love.
On the telephone you wasted much, too much planting time.

Prideful heart, you rush to confess your downfall
and put off for another century our collective happiness.
You accept rain, war, unemployment and unjust distribution
because all alone you could never dynamite Manhattan.




Numerous Heart

It was in Rio.
I was walking on the Avenue around midnight.
There was the promise of the sea
and glittering trolleys
muffled the heat
blowing on the wind
and that wind came from Minas Geraes.
My paralytic dreams my distaste for living
(for me life is a desire to die)
made me a clockwork man
in Galeria Cruzeiro hot hot
and because I didn’t know a soul except that light wind from Minas,
and I didn’t want a drink, I said: Let’s get this over with.

But the city was filled with trembling fascination broad houses
convertibles dashing to the sea
heat’s vagrant voluptuosity
life’s thousand gifts to indifferent us,
and my heart started pounding and my useless eyes wept.

The sea was striking in my chest now, no longer on the shore.
The street ended, where’d the trees go? the city am I
the city is me
I am the city
my love.




Shoulders Hold Up the World

Comes a time when “my God” isn’t said anymore.
A time of absolute purification.
A time when “my love” isn’t said anymore.
Because love came out all useless.
And eyes don’t cry.
And hands only do rough work.
And the heart is dry.

Women knock on the door in vain, you’ll never open it.
You kept to yourself, the light went out,
but in the shadows your eyes gleamed enormous.
You’re all right, you no longer know how to suffer.
And you expect nothing from your friends.

Old age coming doesn’t matter much, what’s old age?
Your shoulders hold up the world,
and it weighs no more than a child’s hand.
Wars and famines and discussions in buildings
only prove that life goes on
and that everybody hasn’t been freed yet.
Some delicate folks who think the spectacle is barbaric
would prefer to die.
Comes a time when dying doesn’t get you anywhere.
A time when life is an order.
Just life, without mystification.




Flower and Nausea

Imprisoned by my class and some clothes,
I walk in white through gray streets.
Melancholy markets peer at me.
Should I go on until I’m seasick?
Can unarmed me revolt?

Dirty eyes in the clock tower:
No, the time for total justice hasn’t come.
It’s still the time for feces, bad poems, hallucinations and hope.
Poor time, poor poet,
stuck in the same impasse.
In vain I try to explain myself — walls can’t hear.
Under the skin of words there are ciphers and codes.
The sun comforts the sick without renewing them.
Things. Things are so sad when you think of them without emphasis.

Vomit this boredom all over the city.
Forty years and not a single problem
solved, just set in its place.
Not a letter written, none received.
All men go back home.
They’re less free but they read the papers
and spell out the world — they know they lost it.

Crimes of the earth, how do you pardon them?
I took part in many, others I hid.
I thought some were beautiful — they were published.
Nice crimes that help you live.
Daily ration of wrong, handed out at home.
The ferocious milkmen of evil.
The ferocious breadmen of evil.

Set fire to everything, including myself.
They called the boy of 1918 an anarchist.
Because my hatred is the best of me.
I save myself with it,
I give a few people some hope.

A flower came up in the street!
Go away, trolleys, busses, steel river of traffic.
Even a faded flower
escapes the cops, breaks the asphalt.
Take a moment of silence, paralyze business,
I guarantee you a flower grew.

Its color isn’t perceptible.
Its petals aren’t opening.
Its name isn’t in the books.
It’s ugly. But it’s really a flower.

I sit down on the ground of the nation’s capital at five in the afternoon
and slowly move my hand over the fragile shape.
Over by the mountains, clouds are building up.
Little white dots are moving on the sea, chickens in a panic.
It’s ugly. But it’s a flower. It pierced the asphalt, boredom, nausea and hatred.




Our Times
to Oswald Alves

This is the time of the party,
the time of people parted.

Vainly we flip through volumes,
we travel, color us in.
The foreseen hour crumbles into dust on the street.
People beg for meat. Fire. Shoes.
Laws aren’t enough. Lilies don’t bloom
by law. My name is tumult,
written on stone.

I visit facts, but don’t find you there.
Where are you hiding, precarious synthesis,
pledge of my sleep, sleeping
light lit on the porch?
Nickel-and-dime certainties bought on loan, not a kiss
rises to my shoulder to tell me
about the city of the whole.

I shut up, I wait, I decode.

Maybe things are getting better.
Things are so strong!

But I’m not things and I revolt.
I have words in me and they’re looking for an outlet,
they’re hoarse and hard,
irritated, energetic,
compressed for so long they’ve lost all meaning,
all they want is to explode.

II

This is a time for mottoes,
a time of people severed.
Of armless hands traveling,
widespread obscene deeds.

The street of childhood’s gone somewhere else.
And the red raiment
red
covers love’s nakedness,
in the night air
it’s not worth much.

Obscene symbols multiply.
War, truth, flowers?

From mobilized platonic laboratories
comes a breath that crests over faces
and dissipates words on the beach.

Darkness spreads but doesn’t eliminate
the substitute for the star in our hands.
Certain parts of us shine so bright! Nails,
rings, pearls, cigarettes, lanterns
are the innermost parts,
the pulse, the gasp,
and the night air is strictly unnecessary
for us to go on, and we go on.

III

And we go on. It’s a time for crutches.
A time for speaking dead
and old paralytics, nostalgic for the ball,
but there is time yet to live and to tell.
Some stories weren’t lost.
I know this house very well,
you go in on the right, you go up on the left,
the big hall leads to awful rooms,
like the one with the unfinished wake, the body forgotten on the table,
leads to a pantry full of acid fruit,
to the clear central garden, the water
that drips and whispers
of incest, blessing and departure,
leads to closed cells that hold:
     papers?
     crimes?
     currency?

O story, old black woman, O journalist, poet, little urban historian,
O deaf-mute, depository for my bankruptcies, open and tell,
girl imprisoned in memory, old cripple, roaches in the files, creaking doors,
              loneliness and repugnance,
enigmatic people and things, tell;
mantle of dust over dismantled pianos, tell;
bones in the street, newspaper scraps, hooks and eyes on the seamstress’s floor,
              black armbands, pigeons, stray dogs, hunted animals, tell.
It’s all so hard when you’ve gone silent . . .
And many of you will never open up.

IV

It’s a time for half-silence,
for frozen mouths, for murmurs,
indirect words, warning signs
on every corner. A time for five
senses in one. The spy dines with us.

It’s a time for dun drapes,
for a neuter sky, politics
in the apple, the saint, in our very delight,
love and not-love, mild
wrath, gin and tonic,
painted eyes,
glass teeth,
grotesque twisted tongue.
We call this balance.

In the alleyway,
only a wall, and
over it, the cops.
In advertising’s heavens,
birds announce
glory.
In the bedroom,
derision, three dirty shirt collars.

V

Listen to lunch hour in the city, how amazing.
Offices empty all at once.
Mouths inhale the river of flesh, vegetables and vitamin-rich meat pies.
Schools of glittering fish leap right out of the sea!
Hunger’s undergrounders weep a rich broth,
through the glass, liquid dog eyes gnaw your bone.
Eat, mechanical arm, feed yourself, paper hand, it’s time for food,
and later, for love.
Slowly the offices fill again, and business, that inchoate shape, evolves.
Splendid business infiltrates the traffic.
Crowds walk right by and never see it. It’s colorless and odorless.
It hides on the trolley, behind the southerly breeze,
comes in the sand, on the phone, in aerial dogfights,
takes hold of your soul and extracts its tithe.

Listen to the slack time to go home.
Man after man, woman, child, man,
clothing, cigarette, hat, clothing, clothing, clothing,
man, man, woman, man, woman, clothing, man,
they imagine they’re waiting for something,
and they fall mute, they ooze out bit by bit, they sit,
business’s last serfs imagine they’re going home,
night’s fallen, between effaced walls, in a supposed city, they imagine.

Hear the little hour of nocturnal compensation; we read, go to casinos, take a stroll along the beach,
body by body, distended at last,
off with the trousers and uncomfortable slave thought,
hear the body grind, entwine, ebb,
stray in remote objects and, painlessly buried beneath them,
trust itself to sleep’s
what-do-I-really-care.

Hear the day’s horrible job
in every country of human speech,
falsification of words dripping off newspapers,
unreal world of registries, where property is a cake with flowery icing,
where suave banks grind sugar’s neck,
and the constellation of ants and money-lenders,
the bad poetry, the bad novels,
the weak delivered to the protection of the basilisk,
the ugly man, mortally ugly,
rowing his boat
on a sinister Saturday afternoon.

VI

In family cellars,
orchids and options
for purchase and legal separation.
Electric pregnancy
no longer brings on fainting spells.
Allergic children
swap around and reform.
There is an implacable
war on cockroaches.
We tell stories
by correspondence.
The table gathers
a glass, a knife.
Meat devours your loneliness.
And thus we preserve the honor
and inheritance of the steer.

VII

Or not, it’s all the same. There are solutions, for every hour and every ache there are
              strong balms, there are balms,
aches by class, of bloody fury
and of placid face. And there are lesser
balms, for repressed ignoble aches,
lesions unauthorized by government
that ache nonetheless,
unbribeable melancholies,
ire, reprobation, disgust for
that old hat, the muddy street, the State.
There’s a keening in the theater,
on stage, in the audience? in the seats?
most of all there’s a keening in the theater,
already late, already confused,
it dims the lights, engulfs the linoleum,
it’s going to undermine warehouses, in colonial alleyways where night rats promenade,
it’s going to soak the ripe corn in the field,
and dry in the sun, a bitter puddle.

And in the keening, my scornful face,
my eye that laughs and jeers,
my utter disgust for your dilapidated lyricism
that would pollute the very essence of a diamond.

VIII

The poet declines
all responsibility
in the march of the capitalist world
and with words, intuitions, symbols and other weapons
promises to help
destroy it
like a quarry,
like a forest,
like a worm.



•—•—•—•—•

• First posted by Berkeley Neo-Baroque Gang of One in late 2005


• Under continual revision and augmentation


• Reproduction rights granted upon request