At a Glance

I
The opposite of Hatred was never Love.
Empathy.
And Indifference's the neutral stance.

II
There's no moral high ground here from where to lecture;
I too shouted hatefully,
in indifference mumbled,
and empathy silenced me. 

III
Megaphone.
Conversation.
Listening.

IV
And every stage in between.

From close to closure - a toast

"I'm emotionally crazy right now," saía da rádio que poluía a esplanada ribeirinha onde fui tomar o vodka com laranja natural -- três euros, é um preço que já quase não existe em local semelhante àquele e em Portugal. E, esse vodka, tomava-o no afogar dessas emoções sempre tontas, sempre tantas, de saber que a Jennifer se entretinha com um amigo novo. Ora não há assexuada amizade entre homens e mulheres heterossexuais: É uma questão de tempo e oportunidade; estado de todos nós antes de a outros nós nos entregarmos. 

Ao saber desse estado Jenniferiano, não mais consegui continuar a nossa conversa telefónica, devido às emoções queimando no peito e, como água na cafeteira ao lume, subindo e misturando-se com a cafeína, que se mistura com o sangue, e que nos levanta e força à cafeína reagir, no meu caso a tomar um duche, fazer a barba, passar no cabeleireiro a que tinha antes desistido de ir neste dia mesmo, mas que agora tarde demais era: A aparadora de cabelo tinha-se ausentado; a depiladora removia pêlo nas traseiras (não sei se do traseiro), e as minhas orelhas tiveram que ficar frondosamente protegidas de agressões externas mais uma dia, pêlo sim pelo não.

E fui, a passo firme, a passo irado, até à beira-rio, até à esplanada, de onde as emoções se podem lançar para desaguar e diluir no Atlântico de águas frias, as quais as emoções quentes, se experientes, buscam. 

E, na esplanada, ambicionava eu saudar pela primeira vez uma nova amiga, mas sobre a Jennifer nada lhe dizendo, contudo dando-lhe atenção tão intensa como se ela fosse a Jennifer. E se isto que te digo te soa a infantil é porque é verdade. Tivesse eu tomado as rédeas do discurso e estaríamos ambos agora lendo uma poesia, porque ler não é um acto solitário, a menos que estejas lendo o que antes escreveste... E mesmo assim!... 

Depois deste pôr-do-sol irei pôr-me-belo, e o que vier receberei de braços abertos, livres que estão da forma do corpo ausente da Jennifer. 

É com estranho prazer que me expresso aqui em português, uma língua que por muito que ela a estude jamais a sentirá porque não a viveu -- tal como eu não vivi em inglês, ou, melhor, se o vivi foi-o noutramente.

Não te iludas -- eu quero que ela viva essa outra vida que agora se lhe apresenta. Não odeio no amor. Apenas queimo os cabos e as amarras que nos atavam um ao outro. E para isso um cigarro basta, seja a sua ignição por fósforo ou por isqueiro (por pedra pederneira ou por espelho demoraria mais do que este texto delonga). E desse cigarro se faz mecha, e dessa mecha se faz a queima, e daí naturalmente fumo.

Vem beber um vodka laranja, essa bebida cor-de-chama, em brinde e hino ao pôr-do-sol, tudo bem rimado com álcool.  

António's box is open, never as destructive as Pandora's.

______

Slow Breakfast

for Jennifer


Fish and coffee in the morning,
fried the day before, the coffee fresh,
favourite day start of mine,
from mother's culture to son passed.

And stories and news in the morning
are not so hard to take in and absorb
as the day is yet to be unfold
against the ending of the world.

Her skin from dreams lightly salted,
her wild mane flowing perfectly,
hiding her face from me as she
heads to the bathroom to holy pee.

That white noise once extinguished 
tells of her return to warmth,
those air-cooled body ends all
touching and soft awakening me.

Bed linen a seascape of stormy seas
bettered by relation-ships: vessels
brimming with coffee and fantasy,
bound from her brain to our bed.

'Stay the course!' the captain
shouts to whomever's the first mate, 
soon to be promoted by sheer  
sharing of raw fish being fried.  

Gardening Day

for Jennifer

There was a French TV series
I watched in my pre-sexteen years
based loosely on Robinson Crusoe,
the protagonist sometimes abandoned
himself by laying face down
on a verdant, flowery field
with twin little boob-like hills
and a view to the ocean. 

Unlike him, or the series writer,
I've no dreams of fucking Mother Earth
unless we're talking of climate change,
earthly motherfucker each denier.

Changing the subject, today
she watered something in me
when she said,"It's a gardening day."
Or maybe it was, "Lure me in."

Arousal is confusing, we feel it while
its full source might not be traceable.

Yet it was a gardening day,
and the sun warmed my petals,
and my roots were unquenchable,
and there's no place for denial
as she's implanted in me.

Those Freckled Skies

Freckles are my punctuation of choice for a female skin. They make men look girlish yet girls look divine.

They've a frailty akin to wearing one’s soul out: For each sin, the blemish is eternally cast.

Divine as a constellation of impossibly far suns which rays are too strong for too fair a skin.

Freckles are a mapped universe, a maze on a milky celestial body.

... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

Of Chicken and Arrows

for Jennifer and Jack

Apollo

The deeper the bond the mightier the loss.
A mother surrenders her child to the world. 
Then, tossing and turning in bed, 
The mother's fears are unfurled.

This scene's a repetition, as old
As the dilemma of the chicken and the egg.
But for the mother and her child, a first
Step into the marvelous, untold. 

How come this little chick 
Became such Hen, or such Cock? 
They stride on their own now
But the mother's still in shock. 

With a void beneath her wing
By the shape of her chick deformed,
The mother swings in between pride
And doubt: did she do her lot?

If Gibran was right, parents are the bow
And their offspring living arrows.
The mystery lies in the Archer, 
To whose force we must bend.

The Bow is left to witness the flight,
The Arrow depends on its fletchings alone
While outside winds shape its aim 
And gravity exerts its pull.

As the mother looks to her side, 
The quiver is nonetheless empty. 
Therefore the quivering lips.
Therefore all this repeated show.

Patience – a virtue

Are you patient, she asked.

Avoiding the memory anchor that every personal question makes us drop in the exclusive deep sea of what is being asked—which makes us forget that that are more seas, with other storms, and other lulls, that we endured or are yet to witness, or to experience—I put the question in a small boat and patiently kept an eye on it to see how it fared on different times of the day during a few days, which currents took it and to where.

I can tell you this: at night, Patience sleeps soundly and quietly. And we’ve to wait for it to wake up to continue with our observations, to further update our log.

From the Talmud to Nietzsche—and I can’t think of better opposites here: the hot blooded Hebrews and the cold headed German—patience comes out as a virtue. But it is also a word. In such quality, is it one those that have a translation in the de facto world?

For the patient reader who navigated through all those marine images above and is now reading this, a reward: those images had a reason, as the first example comes from the sea.

The female anglerfish, at the floor of one of our seas, patiently waits for her lured prey to come close enough to suck it into her stomach. That requires a seemingly substantial amount of patience, and also a tolerant disposition to eat what the sea brings. It requires immobility too. Then a more active male anglerfish will eventually find her, bite his way into her, his body will dissolve into hers, leaving behind but a pair of gonads—bags of semen. And she can collect many pairs from various males. So there’s some lesson here: patience and pain, at least the ability to withstand the latter, seem to walk hand in hand, or at least swim fin on fin. As Aristotle put it, “Patience is bitter but its fruit is sweet.” Or salty, depending on how we cook our anglerfish.

The more active predator is blessed with choice. And which better predator to teach us that than us humans? Supposedly our ancestors were weak and had to resort to tools to hunt down larger preys, which in turn would feed more properly the group that was needed to hunt those same preys. Yet their spears, as one example, were unlikely to kill instantly a large animal. Enters Patience: the patience to follow the wounded animal's tracks until it laid down, bleeding to death.

What lessons can we learn from this couple of examples? That patient ones might be just waiting to eat you alive or to injure you to death. It might be no coincidence that the word patience is also related to suffering.

That’s maybe why the late Christopher Hitchens’ take on the subject of patience is the most dear to my still beating heart:

“Your least favourite virtue, or nominee for the most overrated one? Faith. Closely followed—in view of the overall shortage of time—by patience.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir

Relief - a double entendre

We talk on the phone about our pains,

Our victories, our demands,

Absurdities, peculiarities;

About love, about strength,

Hair loss, diets, sex and penis length.

Sometimes we even sob holding the phone as a life line

Invisible, wireless these days.

But we must connect and reconnect,

Regret — and reregret if we’re pathet.

She does all that on the phone with me.

But while peeing. Splash.

And it feels great.

Cruel Love Duel

   How many masks wear we, and undermasks, 
   Upon our countenance of soul, and when, 
   If for self-sport the soul itself unmasks, 
   Knows it the last mask off and the face plain? 

in Fernando Pessoa's Sonnet VIII, 35 English Sonnets


Though Pessoa took off every mask
And found but more masking of the soul,
He probably forgot one item in such task:
A Dorian mirror that we must face
Naked and unsure,
Vulnerable as the clinical eyes of Love
Reveal the masks and the masquerade
Our lifes have been.

Then our biological self kicks in:
We either freeze, pretend death, 
And believe in rebirth,
Or we flee the scene,
Or fight against the image obscene. 

Rodin's Riders

Auguste Rodin's "Centaur"

To ride with and be ridden simultaneously;
pure, coeval, ride and rider:
the very stuff of synchronicity.  

Abandoning self-control, sweaty, 
animal and anima together, 
the longer they trot the more
their minds bloom away disarmingly, 

Then they gallop:

road, dirt;
orchards, colours;
stones, moons;
town, church;
hilltop, silence;
beach, breeze;

Halt! A break: 

a verdant picnic ensues, new smells,
sight scanning the surroundings,
a radar which will bleep only once 
to tell love to home in on the lover
thus beginning their face à face,
coeur à coeur: il faut courir.  

Newark

for Jennifer


In Newark, a bird landed,
of skies weary, merry its eyes.

An entire continent of humanity
had been under its wings,
incontinent prattle by its side.

Yet, when we move up close,
birds that so gracefully soared
are the embodiment of anxiety.

Mostly so in Spring, nesting,
collecting twig and straw
out of the best tree and field
that while soaring they saw.

Drinking from a nearby pond,
they cool down for a new round
until down the sun goes,
their chirp piercing the dusk
before the tranquil night.

Half the work being done,
soon our bird will fully rest
its bright plumage and breast
amidst the fruit of its toil.

And then, seen from the soil,
secure, a work of much art,
its nest will become a new ark.

To choose is to eliminate

“No no no no no no no no no no no no,” a cute toddler sang without a hint of punctuation. “She’s in love with the word ‘no’,” her grandmother explained.

Perhaps there is simply too much of everything around us, and we have to choose. Or the choice is not even solely dependent on our will. And any choice is a process of elimination of everything else. Or are there superwomen and supermen, these Übermenschen, who can take it all in? Human blackholes, what would become of the information compactly stored within them? Would it be reused in dreams, or lost in faulty synapsing? Would it remerge unexpectedly, uncalled for, to help in the creation of a new work of art? 

“No no no no no no no.”

“Thou shalt not pass!”

Intimacy - a maturing tendril

for Jennifer


Intimacy is time plus its tempo entwined,
rooted deeply into a soil as black as fertile, 
under which water rushes—

mineral urges—and undermines
all that is past, and turns it into a paste 
by the time and tempo intimacy's vivified.    






_______

photo by backyardnature.com

Faith, a puzzle out of bonds

The most important part
was left out of the scene;
the source of light that got in
was not part of the art,
each thought was locked within
each drawer, each head 
thus left alone to devise
what was being unseen.




______

watercolour by Jennifer Allison
One Street Shy

Morning Dew

for Jennifer


Days of rain on her roof
soaked her attic’s woodwork 
under which, in tin trunks kept,
frailly locked by cobwebs and dust,
folded her whole being lays.

Water rushed out 
of pipes by the windows,
dormant seeds, down below,
drank it and sprouted,
and her garden flourished, 
as gardens do on days of rain.

Bone and Marrow

I should have explained my love for bones sooner:
How can we not love a bone? 
The last vestige of us and ours to be gone,
or as vulgar as a bloody boner?

Before we lie under a barrow,
there's only one thing here to be sorrow:
to be gone and all but bone tomorrow
without tasting some marrow.

Walls

Frustration has a history of Walls:

Of Berlin for Berliners

Of China for a Mongol

Of Adrian for the Picts

Of Troy for the Achaeans

Of Constantinople for a Goth

Of Wailing for those who wail

Of Chevaliers outside the Krak,

Fated all to one important event.

I get it now

I get religion now.

I get even self-flogging.

We all want to be loved. Deeply.

We all need to be loved. But deeply.

And if we don't get it, we'll create it.

And if we don't, we'll suffocate.

And if we do, we'll suffocate?

Love or a surrogate,

a threshold we didn't set,

and this life is a quest

for a key,

for there's sorrow,

for there's a gate.

Bring on your whip!

All we have is blood to give.

From Red to Gray - A Scale

I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.
Anne Tyler


"Contrast," she said, "is what art's all about."
I stopped and ruminated on her leafy words.
Sometimes my mind's a giraffe,
and her idea was elevated enough. 

Contrast sensitivity was thought to be fixed,
and that it would only worsen with age. 
While as I age and experience more,
the more contrasts are my focus.

So I turned to stare again at my love's face,
her dark hair against her white skin.
Her dark moods against her smile,
my love for her against all others.

"Contrast," I said, "is what love's all about."
I stopped and ruminated on my starry words.
Sometimes my mind's a space shuttle,
and my idea was burnt by the sun.

My eyes melted under such luminance;
no contrast, no trace; all flamboyance.

In the Desert

In the Desert
By Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen


Half of me horse of myself I rein you in
I quell you by spur and rein

So that you don’t lose yourself in dead cities
So that you don’t lose yourself
Not even in Babylonian trades
Not even in Nineveh’s bloody rivers

I point your snout to the clean desert
To the clean perfume of the desert
To its end to end solitude

Because of that I quell I struggle I rein you in
And the bridle cuts the spur hurts the rein holds you back

To be able to release you in the desert
Where we are not us two but only one oneself
In the clean desert and its perfume of luminaries
In the vast clean brightness of the desert
Within each poem
Light and fire lost but so close
Where we are not us two but only one oneself



__________

Translated by António Dinis Lopes from the original poem "No Deserto" as found in Geografia, ed. Ática, 1967

Photo by Jennifer Allison, "Alone"
One Street Shy