by Adélia Prado
Night! Make yourself useful and cover me with sleep.
Me and the thought of death just can’t get used to each other.
I’ll tremble with fear until the end.
And meanwhile everything is so small.
Compared to my heart’s desire
the sea is a drop.
FROM
Land of Holy Cross
(1988)
The Alphabet in the Park
I know how to write.
I write letters, shopping lists,
school compositions about the lovely walk
to Grandmother’s farm which never existed
because she was poor as Job.
But I write inexplicable things too:
I want to be happy, that’s yellow.
And I’m not, that’s pain.
Get away from me sadness, stammering bell,
people saying between sobs:
‘I can’t take it any more.’
I live on something called the terrestrial globe,
where we cry more
than the volume of waters called the sea,
which is where each river carries its batch of tears.
People go hungry here. Hate each other.
People are happy here, surrounded by miraculous inventions.
Imagine a certain Ferris wheel
whose ride makes you dizzy –
lights, music, lovers in ecstasy.
It’s terrific! On one side the boys,
on the other the girls – me, crazy to get married
and sleep with my husband in our little bedroom
in an old house with a wood floor.
There’s no way not to think about death,
among so much deliciousness, and want to be eternal.
I’m happy and I’m sad, half and half.
‘You take everything too seriously?’ said Mother;
‘go for a walk, enjoy yourself, take in a movie.’
Mother doesn’t realise that movies are like Grandfather said:
‘Just people going by – if you’ve seen one,
you’ve seen them all.’
Excuse the expression, but I want to fall in life.
I want to stay in the park, the singer’s voice
sweetening the afternoon.
So I write: afternoon. Not the word,
the thing.
Trottoir
I know, now, that my erotic fantasies
were fantasies of heaven.
I thought sex lasted the whole night
and only at dawn did the bodies part.
The revelation that we are not angels
came to me rather late.
The king is in love – they say in a whisper –
I delight in imagining his voice,
his hand loosening the heavy crown from his forehead:
‘Come, it’s been so long since I’ve seen brown eyes;
I’ve been in the wars….’
The unadorned king,
his sex erectible but contained,
tenacious as I am, squeezing from voice,
hands and eyes (virtually motionless) a wine,
a purple lushness, biting, semisweet,
the intoxication of a stroll among the stars.
I listen most closely to the voice that is impassioned,
to pulse beats, black holes in the chest,
instantaneous swoons,
where this pagan thing appears luminescent:
a black man making a meal of round-leafed
greenery at the edge of the precipice.
At the edge of sleep, at the edge of what I do not explain
a light shines. And with impetuous hope
the heel of my shoe on the curb
tappitytappitytaps.
Pieces for a Stained-Glass Window
Does Japan really exist?
Or any country I don’t know, with its parched coastline?
What’s between the thighs is public. Public and obvious.
What I want is your heart, the depths of your eyes
which do everything but speak.
If you look at me in Spanish, I’ll snap my fingers
and start dancing, dressed in red.
When I closed my eyes to the sun, I saw a blueprint,
perfection, for only a second
and then forgot.
Just as the saints existed, so does God
with His unspeakable seductive power.
He’s the one who made gold, and gave us the discretion
to invent necklaces to wear around our necks.
Said like that it’s so pure I hardly see the sin
in buying one myself.
I’ve got the same desires as thirty years ago,
immutable as mosquitoes in the sun-drenched kitchen,
my mother making coffee
and my father seated, waiting.
Land of the Holy Cross
At my golden wedding anniversary, greedy as the grandchildren,
I’m going to eat sweets.
I will not look serene, like portraits
of women who ate and spoke little.
Because the monk killed himself
in the thicket outside the abbey.
It’s been said before: There will be no consolation.
And there was: music, poetry, strolls.
Love has rhythms which are not those of sadness:
the shape of waves, impulse, running water.
Well, then – what do I say to the man, to the train,
to the little boy waiting for me,
to the myrtle tree blooming out of season?
Contemplating the impossible makes you crazy.
I’m a lowly tapeworm in God’s intestine:
Well, then – well, then – well, then?
Where were the custodian, the steward, the gatekeeper?
Where was the rest of the brotherhood when you went out,
unlucky Brazilian boy, to meet that tree?
I am my own enemy. Torturers go crazy in the end,
eat excrement, hate their own obscene gestures;
unjust regimes fester.
While you were walking around in circles, divided soul,
what was she doing, saint and sinner, our Mother Church?
Promoting bingo, blessing new buildings, naturally,
but still: she produced you – no one dares deny it –
you and other saints who leave behind marked Bibles.
‘We carry within us our own death sentence.’
‘Love one another.’
He who said: ‘Whosoever believeth in Me
shall have everlasting life’ –
He, too, swung from a piece of wood
like a fruit of scorn.
Nothing, nothing that is human is grand.
A little girl interrupts, pounding at the door,
asking for vine cuttings.
My hair stands on end.
Like a torturer I yank out the cutting,
the eyes, the entrails of the intruder,
and no better than Job I repent my nonsense.
There’s always someone to ask Judas which tree is best:
lucid madmen, mad saints,
those to whom more was given, the almost sublime ones.
My biggest grandeur is to ask: Will there be consolation?
These would fit in a thimble:
my faith, my life, and my greatest fear
which is traveling by bus.
Temptation tests me and almost makes me happy.
It’s good to ask help of our Lord God of the Army,
our God Who is a big mother hen.
He tucks us under His wing and warms us.
But first He leaves us helpless in the rain,
so we’ll learn to trust in Him
and not in ourselves.
Falsetto
The authorities have bags under their eyes
and practised voices for communiqu
es:
We guarantee the best solution on the spot.
Which spot? The pudendum?
God already took care of that, covering it with hair.
My son was a good boy.
He would never have killed himself like the police said.
I touched his head; it was all broken,
a token of their guilt.
The witnesses vanished,
lost their teeth, their tongues,
lost their memories.
I lost my son.
‘…He greeted the rabble, speaking to them of the Kingdom,
to those in need of cure he restored their health.’
Hard words only for liars, legalists
who harness on others the heavy bundles
they themselves would not so much as touch…
Oh, great shriek that I long to shriek,
hiss that would leave me empty.
Certain hues, tamed birds,
a yellow house with a gate and flowers thrill me,
but I can’t enjoy them. I’ve got to preach the Kingdom.
I’d like a country place, a wisp of a farm,
but Christianity won’t let me,
Marxism won’t let me.
Oh, great shriek in the face of palaces
churchly or otherwise:
DIVIDED WE FALL,
UNITED WE STAND!
My swimming pool is not for recreation, said the Pope.
I have no intention of being a prophet, said the Bishop.
What thick rope, what a full pail,
what a fat sheaf of bad things.
What an incoherent life is mine,
what dirty sand.
I am an old woman with whom God toys.
Along with rage and shame
my appetite remains unshakable –
fatty meats, anything floury,
I nibble vegetables as if they were carnal encounters,
I am afraid of death
and think about it at great length
as if I were a respectable, serious,
prudent and frugal lady-philosopher.
If someone will join me, I’ll found a political party,
I’ll overthrow the government, the papacy,
bulldoze all the rectories
and institute my dream:
across a plain, innumerable,
the friars descended in their hoods
like brown birds, peacefully, searching for a place.
I walked with them until they came to a big house.
Where they found a big stove, a big table,
and they all went inside and made themselves at home,
scattering about the house
like true brothers.
Some Other Names for Poetry
I’d like an abandoned city
so I could find things in the houses,
iron objects,
a fascinating picture on the wall
forgotten in the rush.
But without a visible war and with life so expensive,
who leaves behind so much as a needle?
The only place I find things
is in the rich cellar of dreams,
things I’ll never possess.
All my life I’ve resisted Plato, with his broad shoulders,
his crippled Republic where poets are exiled.
After all, errors in translation are rife,
and I don’t know Greek –
I never went through a sack of salt with him.
What he said or what I say
is meat thrown to the wild beasts –
but not what we dream.
There are no lies in dreams,
where everything is naked and we’re unarmed.
Plato’s myth – maybe he wrote it against his will;
who knows? – is as I tell it:
there’s a hole in the corpse’s throat
big as the valley of Jehoshaphat where we will be judged.
No power in the world picks a fight
when the subject is light and shadow,
the morning dew on a horse’s mane or snout.
But the legions of darkness get furious
and the coroner’s office (for suspicious reasons)
hides the photograph of the alleged suicide.
While love, which they don’t believe in,
goes on impassive, spawning just sentences,
blessings, lovers –
in spite of the corpse
and its ruined neck.
Tyrants
Uncle Joaquim was an unabashed dictator.
Only one of the cousins dared to get married;
the others stayed home to honour his memory
with peevishness and small excitements.
They produced crochet and hilarity
(telling tales), virtue
and patience, which were squandered
on misplaced pride, irate Catholicism.
They spent their mutual bitterness on embroidery and greed:
the chicken coop is Alvina’s, the flower bed
is Rosa’s, the soda pop is Marta’s –
but it’s in Aurora’s refrigerator.
They wouldn’t set foot in church for their sister’s wedding:
Aunt Zila is failing, soon
she’ll be in Glory.
With no one to wait on, the cousins
will surely quarrel, grabbing
for rosaries, needles, doorknobs.
But if someone knocks, they’ll serve up cookies
and the story about the tightrope-walking mouse
(which I always request):
‘One day Papa was asleep on the sofa when he heard
a little noise: chin-chin, chin, chin-chin….’
I’m touched by these cousins, aunts and uncles in frames on the wall,
mice, in the middle of the pitched battle of that house, looking to
nibble the leftovers of what, after all, was love.
Love in the Ether
There’s a landscape inside me
between noon and two P.M.
Long-legged birds, their beaks slicing the water,
enter and don’t enter this memory-place,
a shallow lagoon with slender reeds along the shore.
I live there, when the desires of the body,
those metaphysicians, exclaim:
How lovely you are!
I want to excavate you until I find
where you keep so much feeling.
You think of me, and your secret half-smile
crosses sea and mountain,
gives me goose bumps,
love beyond the natural.
The body is as light as the soul,
minerals soar like butterflies.
All of it from this place
between noon and two P.M.
Consecration
Come! I will show you the bride….
APOCALYPSE 21:9
It was at home: Mama was cooking,
I was taking care of the baby.
Restless, because of the boy who was waiting for me.
The baby’s wet, I called,
I’m going to change him.
Mama shot me a look and I went to my room
and tried on dresses to wear to the door
and talk with the boy who whispered:
I want to eat your legs, your belly, your breasts,
I want to touch you.
And he was in fact touching me, the way his soul
shone through his eyes.
Have you changed the baby?
You’re a strange one!
Stop talking to your friends and listen!
I began to cry: pleasure and embarrassment.
He looked at my bare feet and laughed.
The vibrations of the flesh sing hymns,
even those we turn away from:
flatulence (he said in one ear)
yawns (he said in the other)
th
e rhythm of pleasure.
– I was worried the whole time.
– And so naive and naked, he added,
a voluptuous woman in her bed
can praise God,
even if she is nothing but voluptuous and happy.
– Poor people understand that….
– Yes, like when they write on the walls:
US BEGGARS SALUTE YOU, O GOD!
He looked like an angel, speaking of wisdom….
Helios, I called him, you’re that luminescent,
your body acting out your spirit.
– You learn fast, praise be Our Lord Jesus Christ,
he intoned from the bottom of his Christian soul,
enticing me once and for all.
Who is the pope? I asked, anxious to receive the sacraments.
– Our Father Who blesses us.
And he called me cow, as if he were saying flower, saint,
lucky prostitute.
Legend with the Word Map
Thebes, Midian, Mount Hor.
Sphinx-like names.
Idumea, Ephraim, Gilead.
Stories that don’t demand my undivided attention.
Maps relax me,
the deserts more than the oceans
I don’t dive into
because even on maps they’re deep,
voracious, untamed.
How can we conceive of a map?
Here rivers, here mountains, ridges, gulfs,
or woodlands, as scary as the sea.
The legends of maps are so beautiful
they make travel superfluous.
You’re crazy, they tell me, a map is a map.
I’m not, I reply.
A map is the certainty that the place exists;
maps contain blood and treasure.
God talks to us in the map in his geographic voice.
Professional Mourner
What a fate – that of the flowers
covering the woman in her coffin.
More difficult to understand than the thousand-sided polygon!
The tree duck sits on her eggs,
tugs dry leaves into the nest, does her duty.
While I – I’m afraid.
Even so, I desire nothing if not to stare
at the mysteries that take me back.