covering,
And on a sudden, frantic, violent, inexplicable impulse
I accelerate . . .
But my heart is still back at that heap of stones I skirted
when I saw it without seeing it,
At the door of the cabin,
My empty heart,
My dissatisfied heart,
My heart that’s more human than I, more exact than life.
On the road to Sintra, close to midnight, in the moonlight,
at the wheel,
On the road to Sintra, exhausted just from imagining,
On the road to Sintra, ever closer to Sintra,
On the road to Sintra, ever farther from myself . . .
5 MAY 1928
CLOUDS
On this sad day my heart sadder than the day . . .
Moral and civic obligations?
The intricate web of duties, of consequences?
No, nothing . . .
A sad day, an apathy toward everything . . .
Nothing . . .
Others travel (I’ve also traveled), others are in the sun
(I’ve also been in the sun, or imagined I was),
Others have purpose, or life, or symmetrical ignorance,
Vanity, happiness, and sociability,
And they emigrate to return one day, or not to return,
On ships that simply transport them.
They don’t feel the death that lurks in every departure,
The mystery behind every arrival,
The horror within everything new . . .
They don’t feel: that’s why they’re commissioners and
financiers,
Go dancing and work as office employees,
Go to shows and meet people . . .
They don’t feel—why should they?
Let these clothed cattle from the stables of the Gods
Go cheerfully by, decked with garlands for the sacrifice,
Warmed by the sun, cheerful, lively, and content to feel what
they feel . . .
Let them go, but alas, I’m going with them without a garland
To the same destination!
I’m going with them without the sun I feel, without the life
I have,
I’m going with them without ignorance . . .
On this sad day my heart sadder than the day . . .
On this sad day every day . . .
On this very sad day . . .
13 MAY 1928
ENGLISH SONG
I broke with the sun and stars. I let the world go.
I went far and deep with the knapsack of things I know.
I made the journey, bought the useless, found the indefinite,
And my heart is the same as it was: a sky and a desert.
I failed in what I was, in what I wanted, in what I
discovered.
I’ve no soul left for light to arouse or darkness to smother.
I’m nothing but nausea, nothing but reverie, nothing but
longing.
I’m something very far removed, and I keep going
Just because my I feels cozy and profoundly real,
Stuck like a wad of spit to one of the world’s wheels.
1 DECEMBER 1928
SQUIB
All the Lloyd Georges of Babylon
Were utterly forgotten by history.
The Briands of Egypt or Assyria,
The Trotskys of this or that colony
Of ancient Greece or Rome
Are dead names, though writ in stone.
Only a fool who makes poems
Or a mad inventor of philosophies
Or an eccentric geometrician
Will survive the vast unimportance
Of what’s left behind, in the dark,
And which not even history remarks.
O you great men of the Moment!
O great and ardent glories
Of those who flee obscurity!
Enjoy what you have and don’t think!
Cherish your fame and good food,
For tomorrow belongs to today’s fools!
[LATE 1928?]
CHANCE
In the street where all is chance the blonde girl chances by. But no, it’s a different one.
The other girl was on another street, in another city, and I was another.
I suddenly stray from the sight in front of me,
I’m back in the other city, on the other street,
And the other girl walks by.
What an advantage to have an intransigent memory!
Now I regret never again having seen the other girl,
And I regret not even having looked at this one.
What an advantage to have a soul that’s inside out!
At least some verses get written.
Verses get written, one passes for a madman, and then a
genius
If luck will have it, or even if it won’t—
The marvel of celebrity!
I was saying that at least some verses get written . . .
This was with respect to a girl,
A blonde girl,
But which one?
There was one I saw a long time ago in another city,
On another sort of street,
And there’s this one I saw a long time ago in another city,
On another sort of street.
Since all memories are the same memory,
Everything that was is the same death,
Yesterday, today, and maybe even tomorrow.
A passerby looks at me with casual curiosity.
Could it be that I’m making verses in gestures and frowns?
Perhaps . . . The blonde girl?
It’s the same girl after all . . .
Everything’s the same after all . . .
Only I am in some sense not the same, and this is also the same.
27 MARCH 1929
NOTE
My soul shattered like an empty vase.
It fell irretrievably down the stairs.
If fell from the hands of the careless maid.
It fell, breaking into more pieces than there was china in
the vase.
Nonsense? Impossible? I’m not so sure!
I have more sensations than when I felt like myself.
I’m a scattering of shards on a doormat that needs shaking.
My fall made a noise like a shattering vase.
All the gods there are lean over the stair rail
And look at the shards their maid changed me into.
They don’t get mad at her.
They’re forgiving.
What was I but an empty vase?
They look at the absurdly conscious shards—
Conscious of themselves, not of the gods.
They look and smile.
They smile forgivingly at the unwitting maid.
The great staircase stretches out, carpeted with stars.
A shard gleams, shiny side up, among the heavenly bodies.
My work? My primary soul? My life?
A shard.
And the gods stare at it, intrigued, not knowing why it’s
there.
[1929?]
ALMOST
To put my life in order, with shelves for my will and my
action . . .
That’s what I want to do, as I’ve always wanted, with the
same result.
But how good it is to have the clear intention—firm only in
its clearness—of doing something!
I’m going to pack my suitcases for the Definitive,
I’m going to organize Álvaro de Campos,
And be at the same point tomorrow as the day before
yesterday—a day before yesterday that’s always . . .
I smile in anticipation of the nothing I’ll be.
At least I smile: to smile is something.
We’re all products of Romanticism
,
And if we weren’t products of Romanticism, we probably
wouldn’t be anything.
That’s how literature happens . . .
And it’s also (sorry, Gods!) how life happens.
Everyone else is also a Romantic,
Everyone else also achieves nothing and is either rich or
poor,
Everyone else also spends life looking at suitcases that still
need to be packed,
Everyone else also falls asleep next to a clutter of papers, Everyone else is also me.
Peddler crying out her wares like an unconscious hymn,
Tiny cogwheel in the clockwork of political economy,
Present or future mother of those who die when Empires
crumble,
Your voice reaches me like a summons to nowhere, like the
silence of life . . .
I look up from the papers I’m thinking of not putting in order
after all
To the window through which I didn’t see—I just heard—the
peddler,
And my smile, which still hadn’t ended, ends in metaphysics
inside my brain.
I disbelieved in all the gods while sitting at a cluttered desk,
I looked all destinies in the face because I was distracted by
a shouting peddler,
My weariness is an old boat rotting on a deserted beach,
And with this image from some other poet I close my desk
and the poem.
Like a god, I’ve put neither truth nor life in order.
15 MAY 1929
I have a bad cold,
And everyone knows how bad colds
Throw the whole universe out of kilter.
They turn us against life
And make us sneeze even metaphysically.
I’ve wasted the whole day blowing my nose.
My head hurts all over.
A sorry state for a minor poet!
Today I’m truly a minor poet.
What I used to be was a wish: it snapped.
Good-bye forever, Fairy Queen!
You had wings of sunlight, and here I am plodding along.
I won’t get well unless I lie down in bed.
I’ve never been well except when lying down in the universe.
Excusez du peu . . . What a terrible physical cold!
I need truth and some aspirin.
14 MARCH 1931
OXFORDSHIRE
I want the good, I want the bad, and in the end I want
nothing.
I toss in bed, uncomfortable on my right side, on my left
side,
And on my consciousness of existing.
I’m universally uncomfortable, metaphysically
uncomfortable,
But what’s even worse is my headache.
That’s more serious than the meaning of the universe.
Once, while walking in the country around Oxford,
I saw up ahead, beyond a bend in the road,
A church steeple towering above the houses of a hamlet or
village.
The photographic image of that nonevent has remained
with me
Like a horizontal wrinkle marring a trouser’s crease.
Today it seems relevant . . .
From the road I associated that steeple with spirituality,
The faith of all ages, and practical charity.
When I arrived at the village, the steeple was a steeple
And, what’s more, there it was.
You can be happy in Australia, as long as you don’t go there.
4 JUNE 1931
Yes it’s me, I myself, what I turned out to be,
A kind of accessory or spare part of my own person,
The jagged outskirts of my true emotion—
I’m the one here in myself, it’s me.
Whatever I was, whatever I wasn’t—it’s all in what I am.
Whatever I wanted, whatever I didn’t want—all of this has
shaped me.
Whatever I loved, or stopped loving—in me it’s the same
nostalgia.
And I also have the impression—a bit inconsistent,
Like a dream based on jumbled realities—
That I left myself on a seat in the streetcar,
To be found by whoever was going to sit down there next.
And I also have the impression—a bit hazy,
Like a dream one tries to remember on waking up to the dim
light of dawn—
That there’s something better in me than myself.
Yes, I also have the impression—a bit painful,
As of waking up without dreams to a day full of creditors—
That I bungled everything, like tripping on a doormat,
That I got everything wrong, like a suitcase without toilet
articles,
That I replaced myself with something at some point in my
life.
Enough! It’s the impression—somewhat metaphysical,
Like the last sun seen in the window of a house we’re about
to abandon—
That it’s better to be a child than to want to fathom the
world.
It’s the impression of buttered bread and toys,
Of a vast peace without Proserpina’s gardens,
Of an enthusiasm for life, its face pressed against the
window,
Seeing the rain pattering outside
Rather than the adult tears from having a knot in our throat.
Enough, damn it, enough! It’s me, the one who got switched,
The emissary with no letter or credentials,
The clown who doesn’t laugh, the jester wearing someone
else’s oversize suit,
And the bells on his hat jingle
Like little cowbells of a servitude weighing on his head.
It’s me, I myself, the singsong riddle
That no one can figure out in the rural sitting room after
dinner.
It’s me, just me, and nothing I can do about it!
6 AUGUST 1931
AH, A SONNET...
My heart is a mad admiral
Who quit his life at sea
And remembers it little by little
At home, pacing, pacing . . .
With this motion (the mere thought
Of which makes me shift in my seat)
The seas he once sailed still toss
In his muscles bored of inactivity.
Nostalgia’s in his legs and arms.
Nostalgia pours out of his brain.
His boredom turns into raving.
But if, for God’s sake, the heart
Was my theme, why is this poem dealing
With an admiral instead of with feeling?
12 OCTOBER 1931
My heart, the deluded admiral
Who ruled a fleet of never-built ships,
Followed a route Fate wouldn’t admit,
In search of an impossible happiness.
Absurd, verbose, always on the shelf,
Given to a life that merely abstains,
He never gave himself, never gave himself, never gave himself,
As the run-on verse explains.
But there are advantages to a history
Lived in the shadows; the silence of defeat
Has inner roses unknown to victory.
And so the admiral’s imperial fleet,
Laden with yearnings and dreams of glory,
Followed its course with no retreat.
[1931?]
Speak softly, for this is life,
Life and my consciousness of it,
Because the night advances, I’m tired, I can’t sleep,
And if I go to the window
I see, beneath the eyelids of the beast, the stars’ many
dwellings . . .
I wore out the day hoping I’d sleep at night.
Now it’s night, almost the next day. I’m sleepy. I can’t sleep.
I feel, in this weariness, that I’m all of humanity.
It’s a weariness that almost turns my bones into flesh . . .
We all share the same lot . . .
Flies with caught wings, we stagger
Through the world, a spider web spanning the chasm.
21 OCTOBER 1931
I wake up in the middle of the night and its silence.
I see—ticktock—that it’s four hours until morning.
In the despair of my insomnia I throw open the window.
And across the way I see the human,
Crisscrossed rectangle of another lit window!
Fraternity in the night!
Involuntary, secret fraternity in the night!
We’re both awake, and humanity doesn’t know.
It sleeps. We have light.
Who are you? A sick man, a counterfeiter, or just an
A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe Page 18