The Mystical Rose

by Adélia Prado

  it’s Him calling Himself

  with my mouth of fear.

  The bottom of the river falls away.

  Children, my children,

  husband who chose me,

  I, I, I,

  in all this dark, such raw sun:

  ‘Mama, save some supper for me.’

  Not even the whole world could cover such nakedness,

  nor the sea, nor God who’s treating me

  as if I were divine.

  He’s not who they say He is.

  He yells, bids me be crazy,

  snatches back the delights

  that in dreams He allows:

  fish studded in rock face –

  first made of glass,

  then alive, shuddering,

  suspended from mother of crystal,

  mother of amethyst.

  His mouth is dry, He’s thirsty.

  He wants water, I drink,

  He needs to pee, I get up,

  walk naked through the house,

  Lord have pity.

  Humiliation flattens me –

  midnight, midlife at the apex:

  the grave, the mother, this great darkness is God

  struggling to be born from my flesh.

  NOTE: Nigredo is the alchemical term for cleansing by decomposition or putrification, the first step on the pathway to the Philosopher’s Stone; Jung interpreted nigredo as a moment of maximum despair, that is a prerequisite to personal development.

  The Good Shepherd

  Let me be leaden,

  I don’t have a shred of courage left.

  I can’t have or be

  or live or die,

  I can neither go in or out.

  When I clamour for God, He sends me back to time,

  to receipts which

  – by order of the government –

  I must demand of shady shopkeepers.

  Why all this weight on my shoulders?

  I didn’t ask to be the inspector of the world,

  I want to sin, to be free,

  leave the thieves

  to their tax obligations.

  Everything is forbidden,

  there’s no where for me to be,

  it’s as if God’s smacking me around,

  pushing me away –

  and if asking for help is a sin,

  then not asking is insane,

  the same as accepting help from the devil.

  Who is this stranger I call Jonathan?

  Good God, who am I?

  Scorpius is high in the sky –

  in happier days I’d write a line:

  ‘The blaze of Scorpius in the chill of night.’

  Now, it just sounds like flattery,

  the words of a liar,

  a windbag coward.

  You won’t believe this

  – if you think you’re reading a poem –

  but someone just handed me a letter:

  ‘I had dentures put in today,

  and I do look younger,

  but the old-person weariness persists.’

  And my terror vanished –

  because in quoting the letter

  I corrected two words,

  and no one at the gates of hell

  looks to grammar for help.

  Thus once more I’m saved by a power,

  a compassion

  employing the constellations, the mail,

  and the same mother tongue

  that taught me to wail.

  The Merciful One has laid across his shoulders

  His weakest lamb.

  Divine Wrath

  Three days after I was wounded

  – who knows whether

  by God, the Devil, or myself –

  it was seeing the sparrows again

  and the little clumps of clover

  that told me I hadn’t died.

  When I was young, those sparrows

  and lush leaves alone were enough

  for me to sing praises,

  dedicate operas to the Lord.

  But a dog who’s been beaten

  is slow to go back to happy barking

  and fussing over his owner

  – and that’s an animal, not a person

  like me who can ask:

  Why do you beat me?

  Which is why, despite the sparrows and the clover,

  a subtle shadow still hovers over my spirit.

  Whoever hurt me, forgive me.

  The Holy Face

  Your false teeth are stuck? Pray!

  Promise abstinence for a year

  to get those cheap things out of your mouth.

  O God, You’re so good to us –

  roses, removable dentures,

  tufts of grass like tiny palm trees,

  a profusion of miracles.

  The poet Casimiro de Abreu, who was no saint

  but appeared in our schoolbooks,

  used to say, just like Job,

  (and my mother and father):

  ‘A Being we cannot see

  is greater than the fearsome sea…’

  What do I do now, as I discover You in silence

  but also inside me, in my bones,

  dizzying sweetness?

  Dentists are the ones who make dentures, not You,

  the earth is what brings forth roses.

  Ever since I was a girl I’ve been asking to see You,

  show me Your face.

  So, this is the splendour,

  this desert blazing bright,

  too bright to see the way!

  This new sweetness depletes me,

  like being born fatherless, motherless,

  object of a love conceived inside myself.

  A flower isn’t God, nor is the earth, and me, neither.

  Poor and worthless I surrender to whatever it is,

  this force of pardon and repose,

  infinite patience.

  I can almost say I love.

  The Battle

  I lost my fear of myself. Bye-bye.

  I’m off to colder climes, after Jonathan.

  This is how we should live:

  intoxicated by flight

  on a course to certain death.

  I love Jonathan.

  There you have it: the monotonous, diarrhoeal subject.

  ‘He wants to see you,’ said a voice in a dream.

  And thus were unleashed the forms in which God hides.

  You could worship tufts of grass, sand,

  and not discover where oboes come from.

  Jonathan wants to see me,

  so he will.

  The devil howls, handcuffed down in hell,

  while I

  tear my body from my clothes.

  Ardent Memory

  Handsome and mute, he appears

  in a thicket of murici.

  It’s the body’s high summer,

  a season extended by resins.

  Like someone training to see God,

  I look at the curve of his lip, his forehead,

  the prominent nose.

  He never says goodbye.

  When he leaves I don’t notice,

  exhausted by such abundance:

  his fingers have fingernails – incredible!

  The Third Way

  Jonathan betrayed me with a woman

  who didn’t suffer for him

  one third as much as I have,

  some silly tourist romping around Europe.

  Jonathan is so dumb.

  I don’t know if I should find someone more wily

  or wait for him to grow up.

  Without my having to get unmarried or spend a dime,

  a local guy inspires me daily,

  with irresistible possible dangers:

  I could catch TB,

  I could get fat,

  I could study physics,

  I could fast,

  calling up his image at the hottest hour of the day.

  Ism�
�lia says: ‘God is a brick,

  right here on my dog’s nose.

  I’m pure sin’,

  and then scarfs a bowl of rice pudding

  with quiet certainty:

  ‘God loves me, so I will be saved.’

  I don’t have the nerve

  to approach God up close like Ismália,

  that’s why I just yelp,

  and approach men up close.

  I smell Pedro’s shirt,

  Jonathan’s bitter aftertaste.

  When he said pleased to meet you, everyone saw

  how my mouth got all dry, and I fainted in my chair.

  Love embarrasses me.

  I’m from the cachaça generation,

  either you do or you don’t,

  you’re a housewife or go to the convent,

  I can’t be gay, can’t say, hmmm, it depends,

  let’s give that a teensy bit of thought.

  With me it’s wild parties

  or strict piety.

  I didn’t deserve to be born,

  to eat with a mouth, walk on two feet

  and carry inside me twenty-five feet of guts

  all of which desire the filigree of your iris

  whose colour I keep to myself so as not to ruin everything

  and end up utterly ridiculous again.

  I now know, and it cost me,

  why the saints levitate.

  Without a body, the soul has no pleasure.

  That’s why Christ suffered His passion bodily.

  I adore Christ on the Cross.

  My desire is atomic,

  my fingernail is like my sex.

  My foot desires you, my nose.

  My spirit – the breath of God in me – desires you,

  to do who knows what.

  Not kiss or hug, much less marry

  and having a heap of kids.

  I want you in front of me, motionless –

  Saint Francis and the Seraph ablaze –

  and me forever and always

  looking, looking, looking.

  Sketchbook

  Who really cares

  how crushed I was by the oracle’s answers?

  Four times I asked, Does he love me?

  The answers: silence, conflict,

  misfortune, and silence again.

  Can Your love, O God, be that beautiful,

  You who have neither hands nor feet,

  nor that perfect nose

  for which I burn to the last star?

  If only Jonathan loved me…

  But the one who loves me is João,

  even though I’ve loved Jonathan since age twelve,

  since my one happy memory of Sister Guida

  who taught drawing class –

  shapes were a welcome escape from doctrine,

  forms more ancient than Papa and Mama,

  more ancient even than Grandpa,

  demanding I do something

  so they would last, stay there with me in my sketchbook.

  I drew without relish,

  poking the paper with my pencil,

  aiming – I now know –

  (and wish I didn’t)

  to cast out that mortal beauty.

  I was wrestling with the Angel,

  the Messenger who would never again leave me.

  How can something immortal have a name?

  God’s name is anything at all,

  since even when he doesn’t answer

  joy appears like dew.

  Syllabication

  The hole where the tooth was

  and the space from there to the red star above the river

  both contain airplanes and questions.

  People are passing judgement

  on my dress and hair

  while I write a book

  which, according to my sister-in-law,

  ‘leaves behind many memories’.

  My hayseed looks

  rattled a refined young man

  and I endured many moments

  with my mother bedeviling my ear:

  ‘You’re scrubbing your feet for nothing,

  that Notajan or whatever his name is

  will marry some rich girl for sure.’

  I’d rather he hated me

  than to hear that beloved name

  massacred in her mouth.

  O Jonathan, words kill me,

  the perfect and the raw ones.

  Corn, coffee, kitchen soap,

  my poor mother prepared me for life,

  this vale of tears.

  Vale of tears! What a fantastic word!

  If I knew how, I’d say it

  in every language on the planet,

  Vale of tears!

  All of humanity’s eyes emptying,

  to fill ravines between cliffs,

  entire canyons,

  creating an ocean,

  bitter and salty.

  Ocean, no. More like a river,

  because Vale of Tears

  is not as desperate or immense

  as the sea.

  A river has banks,

  land stretching out

  with plants, animals, keepers of cattle.

  A cry can be heard.

  Crazy Behaviour

  The temptation to reject form insinuates itself

  and I can’t tell whether from Good or Evil.

  A weariness with anything that’s revealed

  through the power of words arranged

  one certain way and no other.

  That’s when I’m most certain I’m not God.

  Jonathan, Jonathan,

  My mother can’t say your name right,

  her hate discombobulates the syllables

  and even more so the motives

  for her woeful warnings.

  I too want to overstep.

  Lovers suffocate cacophony,

  admiring the body’s boisterous machine.

  – Papa, did you sleep well?

  Oh, yes! He’d say,

  then innocently mention crowing roosters,

  newborns shrieking in the night.

  But the pleasure of his details!

  If my mother’s right, I’m sunk.

  I’ve always claimed that poetry is God’s footprint on things

  and sung its praises,

  when it’s His feet we should adore.

  Poetry is a shackled servant,

  a blind bird trilling,

  such meagre beauty.

  Meanwhile it is written: ‘You are gods!’

  And we are.

  I want to offer myself to the divine

  in the most perfect poverty

  but the divine will only accept me

  in the most perfect joy.

  Inside the lit light bulb

  the nucleus looks like an egg yolk,

  a brand new chick.

  I have to lie a little bit

  to get the rhythm going

  – or even just to understand.

  A longing wells up, unrelenting,

  for the one who inhabits in my chest:

  Come, Jonathan,

  bring flowers for my mother

  and a pair of handcuffs for me.

  Furious with Jonathan

  I went looking for you in the street,

  knocked my head on a lamppost,

  bled, sobbed, slept,

  and dreamed of heavenly bodies stirring,

  humanoid trees.

  The body is pagan and should stay that way,

  a constant reminder to God

  of his duty to save us.

  Cruel and mortal man,

  I’m disgusted by the arpeggio of liquids

  in your pale abdomen.

  Beat it, you imbecile dog,

  you’re going to go hungry today,

  that bone is mine.

  Bad company is ruining you, my love,

  depleting you of your power to write good poems.

  You get distracte
d, you forget about me,

  give uppity interviews.

  An egg with two yolks

  would move the coldest person,

  but not me, not today,

  I don’t even want to hear about Greek art.

  I draw badly, it’s true,

  but why should Sister Guida

  show off at my expense?

  If Brígida provokes me,

  I’m going to respond like a doctor:

  ‘Brígida, it’s your unconscious that produces bad behaviour.’

  Only this will humiliate her enough,

  and wash the phlegm from these horrendous lines:

  ‘Florid, feverish, blushing,

  my feminine honour convulsing,

  this cyclical, periodic passion drums

  in my chest, ultra-sonic.’

  Scram, you travesty of a poem. Good gracious!

  But, as I was saying,

  come, Jonathan,

  anytime is the right time,

  what matters is to be happy,

  a bird in the hand is worth more –

  come, my gallant! – than two in the air,

  but pray come soon, you scoundrel,

  or I’ll drill you full of holes,

  I don’t give a hoot.

  I’ll be wearing a wedding dress

  and holding forth, a head of cabbage in my hand:

  ‘Dear people, most excellent citizens…’

  Jonathan, you’ll look so fine in your coffin!

  Only one tiny thing holds me back –

  if I commit the crime,

  what will happen later

  whenever I come across a safety pin

  with its ungrateful, super-humble, ultra-useful form?

  And who will trust the word of Isaiah

  who wrote his prophesies for me?

  ‘Make firm the feeble knees…

  the lame shall leap like deer.’

  Hmmm, Jonathan? Answer me.

  The Sacrifice

  Neither sea nor political storm

  nor ecological disaster

  could keep me from Jonathan.

  Twenty winters would not be enough

  to make his image fade.

  Morning, noon, night,

  like a diamond

  my love perfects itself, indestructible.

  I sigh for him.

  Getting married, having children –

  all just pretence, diversion,

  a human way to give me rest.

  There are days when all I want is to avenge myself,