by Adélia Prado
to exist,
such intermittent terror.
Jonathan, if death is love
then why
– if I’m so certain – am I still afraid?
How can a fish be happy when I’m not?
Strange, this business of being human.
One evening, I opened the door
and there was a toad
with this throbbing gullet,
a gentle toad.
And I thought: it’s Jonathan in disguise
come to visit me.
Even so, I shooed him away with a broom
and went to watch television.
Under a starry sky,
I lay sleepless, astonished.
God’s love and His Beauty
are one in the same.
I want to be holy like Agnes
who flies on the wings of beetles
singing to soothe me
with her little girl’s voice:
‘Cast off the chains
around your neck,
O captive daughter of Zion.’
Airplanes are scary
because God is in them.
Embrace me, God, with Your
flesh and blood arm.
Sing with Your mouth
to keep me innocent.
Matter
Jonathan has arrived.
And my love for him is so demented
that I forgot about God,
I, who pray day and night.
But I don’t want Jonathan to linger,
because I’m in danger
of talking crazy
in front of everyone.
When something wants to happen it begs for a brazen metre,
clamouring to be real.
Centipedes take a stroll on my body.
He calls me Agnes
and says un-reproducible things:
‘I sense that a small vase
with three plastic roses
could flood you with life and death.’
Jonathan, do you exist?
Form
There’s only one way to say to someone:
‘I can’t get you out of my head.’
The cello string sets itself vibrating
beneath an invisible bow
and sins disappear like mice caught in the act.
My heart is astounding because it beats
and is filled with blood and is going to stop some day
and because it becomes a pathetic drum
when you whisper in my ear:
‘I can’t get you out of my head.’
Splotches of light on the wall,
a small vase
with three plastic roses.
Everything in the world is perfect
and death is love.
Lighter Than Air
What brought me to Jonathan?
A dream bicycle,
faster than a plane.
Enchanted, it rides on the sea,
leaps mountains,
stops at the flowery gate.
Jonathan is in his office,
the table lamp glowing.
I hesitate to knock,
giving my heart a chance to quiet.
Jonathan senses my presence
and yanks the curtain back,
trying to startle me.
There are two bicycles on the plain.
Guess
Pick a month,
I said to the saint.
She chose October.
And the girl I asked, all innocence,
picked October, too.
I’m not asking anyone else,
since that’s the month
I plan to chisel the raw gold
out of his name.
I was thinking of Jonathan when I rigged
this up,
I’m thinking of him now,
doing what I do best,
sending love notes
with the power of thought:
Jonathan, listen,
I’m the fly hovering around you:
down by the ruins – in October.
One More Time
I don’t want to love Jonathan any more.
I’m tired of this love with no coddling and cuddling,
destined to become old-people love.
Oh! – I’ve never said that before –
old-people love.
Fortunately, it’s a lie.
Even if Jonathan forgets me
and this song is played out of tune
like a bad Bolero,
I still want the Holland bicycle
and later the Gothic crypt
where our bones can sleep.
O Jonathan,
you’re not the one who makes
the invisible cornucopia pour out gold.
Me neither.
I want to uglify the poem
to fling my displeasure at you –
in vain.
The One who gave me these words is writing this,
with my hand.
Letter
Jonathan,
because of you
things are starting to happen to me.
I’m full of fear.
I want to move away from here.
I’m sick of my family, my work in the parish,
and I’ve actually pondered
getting my hair done up like certain singers.
I have no patience for news of who died or got married –
and this whole strange cycle began when I met you.
I go without eating for days, I hardly sleep,
rehearsing dialogs for when we meet
in that distant place far from the eyes of Marcionília,
who, completely out of malice, asked why I’ve been so happy lately.
Tell me what time you think of me,
so I can set my watch for Madagascar time,
where you’re managing to resist sending me a post card.
No one knows about us,
except for Soledade and my dear sister.
I share my delirum only with them.
You could have called, written,
sent a telegram, signs of life.
I’m in danger of getting sick.
I caught myself grunting, kissing my own arm.
I’m truly crazy. From longing. All because of you.
Write to me. Or invent a way – I know a thousand –
to send a message.
I’m standing at the window of the bedroom where I don’t sleep,
watching Alfa and Beta – who in my imagination
represent you and me.
Do you think me childish, Jonathan?
They’re insisting that I go welcome the Ambassador.
I said no. Spelled it out one letter at a time: n-o.
I told them, just for fun,
that I expect a visitor from Manchuria that very day,
a distinguished professor coming all that way to discover
why I fill so many notebooks with this mirrored code:
UOYEVOLI NAHTANOJ.
I’m hoping a war will break out
so you’ll have to immigrate to Arvoredos.
They’re inspecting me. I must have been talking too loud.
I kiss your yellow fingernail and your eyes that pretend to be distracted
merely to intensify my passion,
I’m sure of it, and still it intensifies.
Alfa, my dear, ciao.
Always Your Beta.
Note from the Daring Damsel
Jonathan,
there are suspicious fascists about.
Put on that shirt I hate
– the one from the Moroccan bazaar –
and come by the house, as if to fix the shower.
Take advantage of Tuesday, when my parents
go to visit Aunt Quita in Lajeado.
If their plans change, I’ll send another note.
Don’t bring an umbrella – even if it’s raining.<
br />
I just can’t take Uncle Emílio any more,
the way he knows and pretends not to know
I’m seeing you on the sly,
and is forever making up nicknames for you.
What you said the other day at that party at the rancher’s
is music playing in my ears, even today:
‘I can’t stop thinking about you.’
Me, too, Natinho, not for a minute.
Tuesday, two P.M.,
if the world ends,
I won’t even notice.
In agony,
Beta
One Thing After Another
As hard as I try,
my handwriting doesn’t come out round.
God sees me.
I don’t write letters any more,
only bad words, on the wall.
Fuck you. Die.
I’m tired of saying I love you.
My patience has no beginning and no end.
I never stop thinking about Jonathan.
I detest elegant writing.
Tragedies are sweet.
I learned to talk extremely early.
Everything I say is vanity.
It’s impossible to live without saying I,
word reserved for God.
I don’t know how to be human.
One day I will, if Jonathan loves me:
‘What strong fingernails!’
‘You remind me of someone.’
‘I almost sent you a postcard.’
Crumbs, Jonathan.
You’re going to die some day, too.
Talk to me,
give my heart some rest.
Marvels
I almost went into ecstasy today,
wishing so intensely for a miracle:
for this flower to burst into bloom in front of me,
or for the light to blink three times.
And then from nowhere, the thought that I’m living in sin,
Christ admonishing:
‘He who looks at a woman lustfully
has already committed adultery in his heart.’
But Jonathan isn’t a woman
and who, these days, unless secretly,
follows the Biblical teaching
to whip a misbehaving slave’s back
until drawing blood?
O swallow,
perch on my shoulder as a sign.
O Scorpius,
move your blue tail,
twirl in the sky, crescent moon.
Tell me, old bible, where is my error?
‘How many times did they tempt Him in the desert,
and in solitude afflict Him?’
This beautiful verse
says God ‘killed the Egyptian first-born males.’
‘His breath burned like a live coal.’
God’s law keeps me from Jonathan,
who brings me closer to God,
because he’s beautiful and he loves me
and he’s not afraid to use his flesh-and-blood lips
to touch mine.
In the good old days, they stoned
adulterers to death.
That which holds the sea within its bounds
cares about the sea.
Why not care about me? I know how to rage, too.
I love God, I love Jonathan.
I love, I love, I love.
Trinity
God gives me nothing but dreams.
He takes away everything else, indifferent to my screams,
because every dream is Him disguised as Jonathan
and his unreachable face made of marble.
My boasting! I never went further than brushing fingers
under the saucer:
More coffee, Jonathan? More coffee?
And he thought me daring because I looked at his shoes,
and then right away at the window,
so that, following that oblique line, he would read
the urgency of my soul.
Did he kiss me one day or was that a dream, excessive desire?
God separates me from God, His heart is a furnace
burning with love for me, who burns with love for Jonathan,
who is staring at Orion, impassive as a boulder.
‘Be careful, your fantasies might come true.’
I imagine saying to Jonathan:
Let me hurt your lip to prove that you exist.
‘We must consider the secret judgement of God’,
a light I can barely perceive, shivering in the fog.
Jonathan, who I love, is divine,
but I think he’s human too.
One day he’s going to take my head in his hands with unexpected tenderness.
And then, O God,
almost against my will I’ll say:
I love you.
The Last Supper
He began by saying: ‘Love…’
but couldn’t finish
because someone was calling him.
‘Love…’ as if he were touching me,
speaking to me only,
though there were other people at the table.
‘Love…’ and he scraped his chair nearer.
I didn’t raise my eyes, afraid
of the explicitness of my heart.
My breath was a crackling fire,
heating up the room.
‘Love…’
Just this one word of his unfinished utterance
to nourish the hunger desire perpetuates.
Jonathan is my food.
Pastorals
When it gets to be too much,
when my longing for Jonathan has me really agitated,
I go to the country.
Walking between rows of coffee,
stalks of corn and lustrous tea leaves,
his soulful presence calms me.
He smells of resins,
sweetness,
hidden in termites, tree bark,
honey I’ve never tasted.
My heart pleads for the loving order of the world:
Come, Jonathan. And a beetle appears
with his same way of walking.
I discover that songbirds
do only what gives them pleasure
and they urge me on from the bamboo:
Little woman, you too
should fulfill your destiny.
There’s a sacrament called
The Presence of the Most Holy,
a heart saying the same thing as mine:
come, come, come.
I’ve experienced God’s wrath,
and now his watchful jealousy.
Even in the roots of shrubs
– even in things I see and things I don’t see,
like the imperceptible paths of ants –
He, Jonathan, and I,
knife, sweetness, and ecstasy,
pain that never deserts me.
The Hermit’s Apprentice
It’s very difficult to fast.
I use my mouth to decipher the world,
making words,
kissing Jonathan’s lips,
which call me Primora,
a secret love name he invented.
Mouths play flutes,
the soul is born from the breath of God,
such lovely pain that I ask for more,
just a little bit more.
Please God, don’t ask me to return what you’ve given me.
My body is innocent again,
I love Jonathan like pastures without fences
even if he does forget me sometimes.
This here is murici, it makes cow’s milk smell so sweet!
A herd of butterflies,
a herd of stars in the sky,
created to astonish to my soul.
O beauteous world!
I want to know who made the world
so carefully careless.
Parrots’ tongues resemble
cashew nuts,
J
onathan’s nose, Yours. Perfection plural.
Parrots talk, Jonathan inhales
and from his breath, this sound: Primora.
It was You who loved me first:
‘Take, eat.’
But wouldn’t that mean Your Kingdom is food?
What do I know? I don’t know.
But everything is body, even You,
measurable matter.
The spirit seeks words,
the blind hear sounds,
the deaf see lights,
the chest thunders, ready to explode.
Hail mysteries! Hail world!
God’s body, my mouth,
marvel that I write, at the risk of my life:
I love you, Jonathan,
believing that you’re God
and that that word from your mouth will save me.
You welcome me as you do the Aurora Consurgens:
Come, Primora.
You talk like a man,
but what I hear is a roar
rushing down from the North Pole.
God. Give me courage to be born.
FROM
Oracles of May
(1999)
I want vocatives to call you, O May.
The Poet Wearies
I’ve had it with being Your herald.
Everybody has a voice,
why am I the one who has to get on board
with no say about where we’re headed?
Why not proclaim the wondrous woof of looms
Yourself, with that voice that echoes
to the four corners of the earth?
The world’s seen so much progress
and you still insist on traveling salesmen
going door-to-door on horseback.
Check out this jack knife, people,
Take a good look, ma’am, it’s magic:
slices and screws, tweezes and dices –
a whole set of tools in one!
Dear God,
let me work in the kitchen.
I’m not a peddler, or a scribe,
just let me make Your bread.
Child, says the Lord,
all I eat is words.
God’s Assistant