PATHETIC POEM
What kind of noise is that on the stairs?
It is love coming to an end,
It is the man who closed the door
And hanged himself in the curtains>
What kind of noise is that on the stairs?
It is Guiomar who covered her eyes
And blew her nose fortissimo.
It is the still moon upon the plates
And the cutlery shining in the pantry.
What kind of noise is that on the stairs?
It is the dripping of the water faucet,
It is the inaudible lament
Of someone who has lost his gamble
While the music of the band
Goes down, down, down.
What kind of noise is that on the stairs?
It is the virgin with a trombone,
The child with a drum,
The bishop with a bell,
And someone who pianissimos the noise
Which jumps from my heart.
SECRET
You cannot communicate poetry.
Keep still in your corner.
Do not love.
I hear that there is shooting
Within reach of our body.
Is it a revolution? is it love?
Say nothing.
Everything is possible, only I am impossible.
The sea overflows with fish.
There are men who walk on the sea
As though they walked in the street.
Do not tell.
Suppose that an angel of fire
Swept the face of the earth
And the sacrificed men
Asked for mercy.
Beg nothing.
THE DIRTY HAND
My hand is dirty.
I must cut it off.
Useless to wash it.
The water is rotten.
Or to soap it.
The soap is no good.
The hand has been dirty
For many many years.
At first hidden
In the pocket of my trousers,
Who would know it?
People used to call me,
Offering me their hand.
Hard, I refused.
The hidden hand
Would spread its dark
Track through my body.
And I saw it was the same
To use it or put it away.
The disgust was the same.
Ah, how many nights
Way back in my house
I washed this hand,
I scrubbed it, I scoured it!
For greater contrast,
I wished I could turn it.
Into crystal or diamond,
Or even, at last,
Into a simple white hand,
The clean hand of a man,
Which you could hold
And lift to your lips
Or clasp in your own
In one of those moments
When two people confess
Without saying a word…
The incurable hand
Opened its dirty fingers.
It was a filthy dirt,
Nor dirt of earth,
not dirt of coal,
not dirt of a scab,
Not sweat of a shirt
Of one who has worked.
It was a sad dirt
Made from disease
And from mortal anguish
In the disgusted skin.
It was not black dirt —
The black so pure
In a white thing.
It was gray-brown dirt,
Gray-brown, dull, thistle.
Useless to keep
The ignoble dirty hand
Lying upon the table.
Quick, cut it off,
And through it into the sea!
With time, with hope
And is machinery,
Another hand will come,
Pure — transparent —,
And fasten itself to my arm.
SADNESS IN HEAVEN
In heaven also there is a melancholy hour.
A difficult hour, when doubt invades the souls.
Why did I make the world? God wonders
And answers: I did not know.
The angels at Him in disapproval.
Their feathers fall.
All the hypotheses: grace, eternity, love
Fall. They are feathers.
One feather more, and heaven is undone.
So quiet, no breaking noise tells
The moment between everything and nothing.
Tat is to say, the sadness of God.
THE DEAD IN THE FROCK COATS
In a corner of the drawing room was an album
of unbearable photographs,
Many meters high and infinite minutes old,
Over which everyone leaned
To make fun and to laugh at the dead in frock coats.
A worm began to eat the indifferent frock coats,
And he ate the pages, the dedications, and even
the dust on the pictures.
The only thing he did not eat was the inmortal
sob of life
Which broke from those pages.
THE OX
O solitude of the ox in the field,
O solitude of man in the street!
Amid cars, trains, telephones,
Amid screams, the profound aloneness.
O solitude of the ox in the field,
O millions suffering without a curse!
Whether it is night or day makes no difference,
Darkness breaks up with the dawn.
O solitude of the ox in the field,
Men writing without a word!
The city cannot be explained
And the houses have no meaning.
O solitude of the ox in the field!
The ghost ship passes
Silently trough the crowded street.
If a love storm should blow up!
The hands clasped, the life saved…
But the weather is steady. The ox is alone.
In the immense field: the oil derrick.
CONSOLATION AT THE BEACH
Come on, don´t cry…
Childhood is lost.
Youth is lost.
But life is not lost.
The first love is over.
The second love is over.
The third love is over.
But the hurt goes on.
You have lost your best friend.
You haven´t tried any traveling.
You won no house, ship, or land.
But you look at the sea.
You haven´t written the perfect book.
You haven´t read the best books
Nor have you love music enough.
But you own a dog.
A few harsh words,
In a low voice, have hurt you,.
Never, never have they healed.
But what about humor?
There is no resolution for injustice.
In the shadow of this wrong world
You have whispered a timid protest.
But others will come.
All summed up, you should
Throw yourself — once and for all — into the waters.
You are naked on the sand, in the wind…
Sleep, my son.
SEARCH FOR POETRY
Do not make verses about happenings.
For poetry, there is no creation or death.
In her eyes, life is an unmoving sun,
Which neither warms nor lights.
The attractions, the anniversaries, the personal incidents
do not matter.
Do not make poetry with the body.
This excellent, complete and comfortable body, so unfit
for lyrical flow.
Your drop of gall, your face-making of pleasure or of pain
in the dark
Are of no account.
Do not tell me your feelings,
Which capitalize on ambiguity and attempts the long journey.
What you think and feel, that is not yet poetry.
Do not sing your city, leave it alone.
The song is not the movement of the machines or the secret
of the houses.
It is not music heard in passing; nor the sound of the sea
in the streets near the edge of spume.
The song is not nature
Or men in society.
For it, rain and night, fatigue and hope mean nothing.
Poetry (do not make poetry out of things)
Eliminates subject and object.
Do not dramatizes, do no invoke,
Do not investigate. Do not waste time telling lies.
Do not be anxious.
Your ivory yacht, your diamond shoe,
Your mazurkas and superstitions, your family skeletons
Disappear in the curve of time, time are worhless.
Do not resurrect
Your buried and melancholy childhood.
Do not oscillate between the mirror
And your fading memory.
If it faded, it was not poetry.
If it broke, it was not crystal.
Penetrate deftly the kingdom of words:
Here lie the poems that wait to be written.
They are paralyzed, but not in despair,
All is calm and freshness on the untouched surface.
Here they are alone and dumb, in the state of the dictionary.
Before you write them, live with your poems.
If they are obscure, be patient. If they provoke you,
hold your temper.
Wait for each one to actualize and to consume itself
In the power of language
And the power of silence.
Do not force the poem to come out of Limbo.
Do not pick from the ground the poem that was lost.
Do not flatter the poem. Accept it
As it will accept its own form, final and concentrated
In space.
Come closer and contemplate the words.
Each one
Has a thousand secret faces under a neutral face
And asks you, without interest in the answer,
Poor or terrible, which you will give it:
Have you brought the key?
Please note:
Barren of melody and meaning,
The words have taken refuge in the night.
Still humid and saturated with sleep,
They roll in a difficult river and turn themselves
into despising.
DAWN
The poet was drunk in a streetcar.
Day was dawning behind the backyards.
The gay boarding houses were sleeping most sadly.
The houses also were drunk.
Everything was beyond repair.
Nobody knew the word was going to end
(Only a child guessed it but kept silent),
That the world was going to end at 7:45.
Last thoughts! final telegrams!
Joseph, who had mastered his pronouns,
Helen, who loved men,
Sebastian, who was bankrupting himself,
Arthur, who said nothing,
Set all for eternity.
The poet is drunk, but
He listens to an invitation in the dawn:
Shall we all go dancing
Between the streetcar and the tree?
Between the streetcar and the tree
Dance, my brothers!
Although there is no music
dance, my brothers!
Children are being born
With such spontaneity.
How marvelous is love
(Love and other products).
Dance, my brothers!
Death will come later,
Like a sacrament.
ASPIRATION
Id not want any longer the maternal adoration
Which finally exhausts us and then flashes in panic,
Neither do I want the feeling of a precious find
Like that of Katherine Kippenburg at the feet of Rilke.
And I do not want the love, under silly disguises,
Of that same nymph desolate in her hermitage,
Nor the constant search of thirst rather than of lymph
And neither do I want the simple rose of sex,
Hidden, meaningless, in the hostels of the wind,
Just I do not want the geometric friendship
Of souls who elected one another in a proud cultivation,
An overlapping, perhaps? of melancholy needs.
I aspire rather to a faithful indifference
But poise enough to sustain life
And, in its indiscrimination of cruelty and diamond,
Able to suggest the end without the injustice of prizes.
===================================================
From
AN ANTHOLOGY OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRAZILIAN POETRY
Edited, with introduction, by Elizabeth Bishop and Emanuel Brasil
Sponsored by the Academy of American Poets
Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1972
POEMA DE SETE FACES
Quando nasci, um anjo torto
desses que vivem na sombra
disse: Vai, Carlos, ser gauche na vida.
As casas espiam os homens
que correm atrás das mulheres.
A tarde talvez fosse azul
não houvesse tantos desejos.
0 bonde passa cheio de pernas:
pernas brancas pretas amarelas.
Para que tanta perna, meu Deus, pergunta meu coração.
Porém meus olhos
não perguntam nada.
0 homem atrás do bigode
é sério, simples e forte.
Quase não conversa.
Tem poucos, raros amigos
o homem atrás dos óculos e do bigode.
Meus Deus, porque me abandonaste
se sabias que eu não era Deus
se sabias que eu era fraco.
Mundo mundo vasto mundo,
se eu me chamasse Raimundo,
seria uma rima, não seria uma solução.
Mundo mundo vasto mundo.
Mais vasto é meu coração.
Eu não devia te dizer,
mas essa lua
mas esse conhaque
Botam a gente comovido como o diabo.
SEVEN-SIDED POEM
Translated by Elizabeth Bishop
When 1 was born, one of the crooked
angels who live in shadow, said:
Carlos, go on! Be gauche in life.
The houses watch the men,
men who run after women.
If the afternoon had been blue,
there might have been less desire.
The trolley goes by full of legs:
white legs, black legs, yellow legs.
My God, why all the legs?
my heart asks. But my eyes
ask nothing at all.
The man behind the moustache
is serious, simple, and strong.
He hardly ever speaks.
He has a few, choice friends,
the man behind the spectacles and the moustache.
My God, why hast Thou forsaken me
if Thou knew'st 1 was not God,
if Thou- knew'st that 1 was weak.
Universe, vast universe,
if 1 had been named Eugene
that would not be what 1 mean
but it would go into verse
faster.
Universe, vast universe,
my heart is vaster.
I oughtn't to tell you,
but this moon
and this brandy
play the devil with one's emotions.
INFÂNCIA
Meu pai montava a cavalo, ia para o campo.
Minha mãe ficava sentada cosendo.
Meu irmão pequeno dormia.
Eu sozinho menino entre mangueiras
lia a historia de Robinson Crusoé.
Comprida historia que não acaba mais.
No meio-dia branco de luz urna voz que aprendeu
a ninar nos longes da senzala — e nunca se esqueceu
chamava para o café.
Café preto que nem a preta velha
café gostoso
café bom.
Minha mãe ficava sentada cosendo
olhando para mim:
— Psiu . . . Não acorde o menino.
Para o berço onde pousou um mosquito.
E dava um suspiro . . . que fundo!
La longe meu pai campeava
no mato sem fim da fazenda.
E eu não sabia que minha historia
era mais bonita que a de Robinson Crusoé.
INFANCY
Translated by Elizabeth Bishop
My father got on his horse and went to the field.
My mother stayed sitting and sewing.
My little brother slept.
A small boy alone under the mango trees,
1 read the story of Robinson Crusoe,
the long story that never comes to an end.
At noon, white with light, a voice that had learned
lullabies long ago in the slave-quarters — and never forgot —
called us for coffee.
Coffee blacker than the black old woman
delicious coffee
good coffee.
My mother stayed sitting and sewing
watching me:
Shh — don't wake the boy.
She stopped the cradle when a mosquito had lit
and gave a sigh . . . how deep!
Away off there my father went riding
through the farm's endless wastes.
And 1 didn't know that my story
was prettier than that of Robinson Crusoe.
Metadados: Metampoemas /metapoems
Página publicada em janeiro de 2009
