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LYNX

O my mother
we fly
This is the world,
a water surface
at dawn, we fly
so accidental

These bodies
determined,

eleven years old
my knowledge, my spider body
climbing

Memory of war

I was the root
of a tree,
a bridge
over the haste
of a lynx, I was
a source

hidden
in the mountain, the crack
of soles on the ground
over sunshine's suddenness turned
inside out

A splinter I was,
where light is diffracted, a sea
of sky

and there in the sea, he
who swam, exposed
to looks, locked up in a mask
of wounds

He doesn't mention
death, he is not bothered
by sunshine
he turned around
and said
"right here
there is no sea". We looked
behind him, and there was nothing

O, let us see the tree
which offers a tree-shadow, let the tree
behind the wind
from twelve nights ago
a wind of absence, of rusty dark:
Do not return to the same
place! there are no same
places, there are no places,
encounters!

I swim in the half-grass, in this tree
where space plays
with its own volume
At the root of sound
its poppy,
Sparta
Black bread

Let our language, he had
begged, let our language under these walls
of old wallpaper dirt and false kindness
these days of bread queues
and bad smell, let it be completed
in its purpose

All those years
namelessly stored on
each other in a suffrance
we now know
was so meaningless,
all that remains
are the old
knitting patterns
where prayer
grows more distinct

On a pine tree plain
near Tartu
It is morning and he who had
read the world
in the knit mitten edging
is silent

Do not let silence, he had prayed,
let speech
and our longing -

But this is the space
where soldiers
entered the room
and lifted his bed-quilt
and laughed
at the fear
of the nine year old
The next morning he had run away,
it was dewing grey and lamps were flashing
over edgings, red
of berries, blue of leaves

also through dawn, the very last drops
of darkness

GHECCO

He had not
seen God
but says he saw
the wind

Grey traces in the growing,
and the abyss
immediately beneath the birds

(Cathedral of Graca, Lisbon 1987)

Sanctuary of The Impossible

I

I walk on holes, I fall
in this living uncertainty, the absolution
of chance

I walk on forgetfullness, on holes
They turn their backs
of emptiness
to my weight, to
The Sanctuary
of The Impossible

Here on the overfilled bus
her look that slides over crowded
apartment houses, the shabby
hill side much too steep
We are back. Also a sudden
sherd of cat, also
the bus heat, the sweaty
bodies in their grey death-wandering
Through the shaking bus, objects
which hurry through a life and make
it visible

Here dust was born, and hunger
And everything reflected, everything
already happened,
an insect wing that flies away
in a dry gutter, beside the flag
which pants its 1x2 totoloto,
also her smile, sad
And transient
as purity

II

Just before closing time he wipes the
floor, butts, bottle caps
newspaper remnants, we live
in this lack
of connection

When I climb the steepest
hill here, am I then
merely an arbitrary dis-
placement, a
suggestion
up the slope,
a proposition of motion, a
way,
a story fugitive
in want?

What a person is?
A tale...the story
of a poor man's longing,
traces in what we think
is the world,

flowers, rusty roses
along a gravel path. A dog
skeleton hidden in the sand, a wiped off
muddle, shape
sinking back
But paths do not mourn, gravel
feels no pain
Sunken through lives century-old, the woman
at the bar looks up
These round tables
are no ocean stones, this
movement on much-too-high-heels
No peacock

III

In the cathedral
a goddess reaches out
a spindly hand
in a cloud of white and pale red
flowers
Under her sight half closed, the burning
yellow earth, steep
fissures,
here the first eye was lit
over bus faces Monday morning,
the choreography of life

Grass was heavier then, more
like enamel
And she closed
her eyes
under fingers growing a field
of splinters. Under its blue-grey nothing
her look, a figure

of water, forced to the same writing
of pale vowels, flowers
that verify themselves
Only in the tenderness of its tale
was the divinity ever
holy. In the certainty
of its eggshell fragility, everything

that moves
in everything
The moon crescent in the dark of houses, man
through the tongue
in Barata Salgueiro

(Venice and Vincenza, 1983, 1995)

Broom flowers

Other pictures. Light vibrates
over the ground, broom's scent fingers
draw over a wall
a sudden run,
a trace passing
evening's ghecco wind
A dwelling warmth

Clothes restlessly flutter,
people dress here, and wash
Sea winds make lungs
of a pink dress, and children
skip
The sun has turned shadows
over this market place
for five centuries, the sun
helium workshop just
lit and maybe
the Universe is closed,

also this market place. The Maurean
arcades, the old man with his sun
glasses over his goggles and a radio
under his arm
And in this Universe no energy
inexplicably loose, just
an equlibrium
between matter and
gravity,

where swallows precipitate and the man in dyed
crew cut leans over the bar desk
in new conversations
If nothing
but these gestures,
a breeze over matter's terrifying
silence,
if the sun really
is a star
a movement towards immobility, finally
invisible
Then silence will invent
the damp angel sand which lifts
the girl, over cassette tapes drawn out in the dust
between cigarette remnants and dry branches,
the purposeless beauty, reality
that forces water
out of the dress on the clothes-line

(For Toiko, in Dardagny and Lisbon)

Shark

Are there no more angels here
on Earth?
And no more eyes
to see?

Sator

People are there
as long as the revelation

...early morning, that morning
the token was written down, reality's
delirium
The last cup of coffee
shiny table surface,
sugar
The children play
the world's last game, and the apple
tree is in blossom
It is spring... .

Truthful mouse stories

When the mouse singers had died
out, the Legend of the Tone was nonetheless
preserved

The mice told, while their ears
were muting to something quite different
(than they had been in the epoch
of the songstresses), about
an inexpressible sweetness. There was
an absolute. The body nowadays lacked
the capacity to perceive
what was once referred to as
the Tone, and the certainty
of the intangibility of this truth
was regarded as the greatest wisdom

Certain rebel mice
suggested that the concept of tone
should be deserted as a designatin
of the most perfect, true
Perhaps, they said, it would be more truthful
to at most intimate. Keep quiet

O, days that tear a little, give
in. An arithmetic of growth,
in spring twilight, mouse shadow

The origin of iron

The breath through grey leaf-
masses, the suddenness a summer day

"it is beautiful here, isn't it?"
And perhaps in the evening
behind the shadow of the dancing
willow, on the wall

maybe she dwells
in twilight
behind the iron

She can also imagine
love, and mathematics
the formulation of what is maybe
possible

in cadence through red
functionalism, New York
two seconds after the explosion
Here are no lungs, here
is only breath, crowding
and breath-taken

But wind-dressed, wind-carried
is Our Lady, black lady
coated by blacking green
Atlantic air, and sore

for unexpected and capricious
is divinity, an arrow in an eye,
the very early landscape

...o, that all this
would be Paradise!
That she who runs
will never fall
Never
really fall

Shark's eye

No one knows how old we have become
old, no one knows, not time
Not the slow force
of gravity,
nor the coast, landscapes worn

Wolf

she said that water rests
in its own unrest
which we perceive
as calm, she said
you could hear the passing time, uneven
flow
to and fro

the mountains. She said
we could reach them,
white finger-
tips

And wanted to play, she said: I am
A nameless

Wolf light

I

You asked me in my dream
what time is. When I answered you turned
away
But I know, I called out
and knew
Already was my answer dissolved

Where does the recent now
of a moment pass? My face
you just saw,
"imagine that the world emerged by a mistake,
like when you lose a plexiglass
on a stone floor"

II

I have a picture of you
on the wall, black, white
and grey

March twilight, an airplane shadow
moves over the roofs
What is it the paper attempts to
interpret? The granularity
of the pigmentation effaces the angles
of your eyes, and the mouth keeps moving
under my effort to see. What
is an other? Air planes
plunged in borrowed light,

on summer mornings, a little child
who plays by the seashore
(the colours of stones are clearer in water),
and the stone which is me
is washed over
by other rains, by the prospects
of other truths
Three straight cuts, a giant
crosses over. And under the roofs
the street space catches hold
of the slowly wandering
of nearby stars
Like us, perhaps they call their neighbours
But which homes, which places
in this sinking?

III

It is quiet. I breathe and it is silent,
we talked at length and I shut my eyes, lifted
by pictures gently passing,
the oddness of a touch
of other seashores

It is quiet. Am I asleep?
We talked a minute ago about the burned land,
the meadow's faithless green. It retains
no steps, Earth's file of index cards
where exchangeable pass
Maybe in the glimpses between sleep and wake,
the waves between dead and alive,

like the sun ray forcing
its way through the heavy curtain, a way
through the room, in the hair
on her shoulders, in the stripes
of her lips. She looks up, somehow
astonished

Scent of linen, charlock blossom,
an afternoon wind drives across the field
And she dips her fingers
in the water furrows,
perhaps the dead communicate
by means of winds, of wind grey
aspens

IV

I was a child
by the water side, played
with the shells
and stones, wrinkles
of sand
Sometimes we collected mussels
But no fire

Like stars, stones dispersed,
glittering in the sun. According to which
order are they given room, which clockwork
carries stones, the movement of stars?
Voids fumbling
in each other's space, clamping
onto nothing, falling
towards nothing

No, why should anyone
be more concerned
than the sun by a water surface,

than a feather by the waves, so light
And groping for another Earth, attachments
for the weightiness. They said affinities
draw limitations through all
things, specific ones
for every body

V

"Every man has a part in light", on my wall
I have a picture. Of you? These eyes that look at me
so questioning, accusingly
O, let us chat, let us tell some lies
together
Breakfast light, let us wake up, perhaps
we talk about our dreams, a door
that can't be opened and something
that approaches, weird
and other

The snow light is so white today
I dreamt we walked
along the road, a winter day like now
Then suddenly I saw the buds, all swelling
like in May

The rooms are much too white
You said you are a stranger here, but trees
are they not just as strange? Indifferent
their frozen time which flows away
I looked out of a window
in my dream. A yard
there under me, enclosure
with a tree
From which a piece of cloth is hanging, and I strech out
to reach it as it flutters back, around
the tree and drapes it

And in the dream you tell me
that to carry fruit the tree
invokes the darkness
where all light is hidden

VI

The Milky Way hovers
in dimmer light,
for skaters' moist dance, a city

where fragments of nightly tales
appear. They sang
you must tar your back
and keep fir twigs
in mind, sign secret weeping,
weep and tar

And space grows denser there,
your face,
your ears spread out, a
picture's hunger
Thursday, vacuum-cleaning, laundry,
and the witch goes to the
supermarket, gets
her dough for gingersnaps
and eggs and matches, tsimtsum, in this
best of worlds, laboratory
for Paradise studies

And sure, we have mapped out
the trajectories of motion, and you
fried eggs for breakfast, they should
be eaten there
at once

you said, and morning
struck into the kitchen,
pictureless like time,
and lemon green

VII

on my wall
I have a portrait
Reflected in the wall stains,
in shadows long since erased

"They have taken my face
away from me",
wrinkles between gold foils, pictures
of time, all time, clay eyes
out of the dusting earth
where the young child plays in the early light

...perhaps she covered her ears afterwards,
when she had ignited
(that was the fire)

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