Be like sandalwood, that perfumes the wounding axe

                I will say what once was said
                So the mind will never forget
                That one day our lips, leaves, were made
                Grass, rapid sky, velvet and dense fog.
                This smoke in the void seems
                the other, life, that
                lasts as lightening bolts last, quartz
                a pupil dilates and irradiates.
                Who would say, for instance,
                that under the flesh of incense,
                in the evening’s duramen,
                the sandalwood inhales
                and causes no scandal. Polivox
                There is no voice that is mine
                on this morning of being awakened by the washing machine,
                birds in cages made of wind and Villa-Lobos.
                Other voices intersect with it and mix
                In the cateract of sentences which I am writing
                and which slowly watch me, recognizing.
                And other breath of silence reanimates us. Tongues
                collide in the toxin of islands
                in the exile of all paths
                (which, however, do not fork. They
                hide––in the yesterday wherein they drain––
                In a tulmult of echoes, reflections in a grotto).
                Would poetry be the art of listening?
                Patriotic Games
                Rain in the cup of Sha. Courtyards are empty, skies simulating their blues etc.
                Simile –– smile –– simulacrum –– missile:
                The paper sucks ink, drags its substance and dazes insignificances in a stormy surface, surefire.
                Black island. Signs pulse. Back to the future.
                We open envelopes with anxiety: find only blank sheets.
                Wave, syllable breaking there; lip’s edge.
                Think of truth, chimera, while you finger the first leaves of grass.
                Exhaustions, suspended phones, off the hooks. . . . . . .
                The ego erases itself, sous rature, sutures itself; gazes at the mirror and sees only its back.
                Thalassa –– ad infinitum.
                S.
                Dry dream, sour rain, joints of abyssinian/discontinuous prose. . . . . . .
                An abyss.
                Language in zig-zag, cornered by zugzwang, scuds over a neutral zone.One zap, and the moon dissolves. A zoo from zen to zoom? Zeitgeist?
                Polaroid logic.Expectations & disappearances.You focus and suffocate, unnoticing
                the snake’s venom, the next sentence’s moment.

                        

Translated from the Portuguese by Christopher Daniels
Copyright © Christopher Daniels, 2003.  All Rights Reserved.