to Úrsula and Antonio Pereira
Cavalo Morto is a place that exists in a poem by Lédo Ivo. A poem by Lédo Ivo is a glow worm searching for lost coins. Each lost coin is a sparrow with its back turned, perched in the light of a lightning rod. There is a buzz inside a lightning rod of prehistoric bees around a watermelon. In Cavalo Morto watermelons are half-sleeping women & in the center of their hearts is the rattle of a bunch of keys.
Cavalo Morto is a place that exists in a poem by Lédo Ivo. Lédo Ivo is an old man that lives in Brazil & appears in anthologies with a crazed face. In Cavalo Morto the crazies have fly wings & they stash burnt matches back in their boxes as if they were words grazed by the splendor of another world. Another world is the bottom of a glass, a place where what is straight is shaped like a horseshoe & there is only one street bound in gabardine cloth.
Cavalo Morto is a place that exists in a poem by Lédo Ivo. A place that exists in a poem by Lédo Ivo is a river that rises at dawn to go manufacture water for tears, small lies made of rain pricked by an acacia thorn. In Cavalo Morto airplanes bind the sky in vapor ribbons, as if the clouds were a Christmas gift & the happy & the unhappy ride straight up to the eternal hippodromes on the gangway of the bander of seagulls.
Cavalo Morto is a place that exists in a poem by Lédo Ivo. A poem by Lédo Ivo is the lover of a sundial that tiptoes out of hostels on the morning after. The morning after is what those who failed to have their tryst were going to say to one another, those who despite that failure still loved each other & leave arm in arm with evening's breeze to celebrate the birthday of trees & write scores for bicycle bells.
Cavalo Morto is a place that exists in a poem by Lédo Ivo. Lédo Ivo is a school full of finches & a helmsman that serenades in the milk platter. Lédo Ivo is a sick man that bandages up waves & ignites the light of ship lanterns with his kiss. In Cavalo Morto all perfect things belong to another, like how the screw of starfishes belongs to the looter of sleepwalking heads & how the postman of Sunday's roses belongs to the small light corona of domestic workers.
Cavalo Morto is a place that exists in a poem by Lédo Ivo. In Cavalo Morto when a horse dies Lédo Ivo is called upon to raise it from the dead, when an evangelist dies Lédo Ivo is called upon to raise him from the dead, when Lédo Ivo dies they call for the tailor of butterflies to raise Lédo Ivo from the dead. Listen to me, beautiful memories are as fleeting as squirrels, every love that ends is a cemetery of hugs & Cavalo Morto is place that does not exist.
Dragonfly Hook
You have invented me.
—Anna Akmahtova
(Starki, August 18, 1956)
I had a dragonfly in my heart in the way others have a homeland
they praise with the seed of their eyes. Truly
the various species of truth are hard things to believe,
strange beings turned to stone by tenderness like benign nodules
on perfect bones. In those days
I dreamed of a dragonfly among reason's reeds.
Exhausted like closed umbrellas she collected the listening wood
from a non-existent ocean & with it she built something like a house.
In those days conversations were something like a house,
words related to the superstitious eyelash, cats in the cherry trees.
I was unaware of the bonds & all darkness was to me a gift,
a rumor of eternity that gave itself like a naked body to my hand.
It wasn't the mouth of love that exhaled that rust, but love's fancy,
like a tailor wearing green pants on the day of happiness.
Truly the various species of truth are hard things to believe,
men's illusions are a light that arrives from the unknown,
they don't own these inventions, they only own the noise of
a borrowed rumor,
just the niche of the man who stores his pleasures in it.
I had the seam of dragonfly in my heart
but the brainy leaves caused my hands to grow inward
in search of a crowbar to clear out the stone of fear.
Without effort I began to cry backwards, to confuse the senses
that guide the grammatical droplet toward a foreign tongue.
Before they took me as a stranger, since I didn't own that invention,
I distanced myself from the optimism of being understood by more than two
& I began to hear my own words as hammer strikes that ring throughout
an empty space.
It was as if time had stopped,
as if all the works dreamt up by a blind man melted when touched,
as if the lobster had descended over the fields of the spirit.
I only had a dragonfly in my heart in the way others are brothers to vertigo
& carry with them the aorta of the constellations gathered in their temples.
It's fine, the various species of truth are hard things to believe,
it's probably that invisibility & all these things
only relate to a dragonfly.
Psalm of the Blessed
Keen vein, give me your string
—Antonio Gamoneda
Blessed is he who at forty has still known no reward & calls a shoestring
virtue,
the man without certainty who reclined in the grass spends his days sleeping
& debates the efforts of grasshoppers.
Blessed is he who bears the weight of the debt of truth, the one quarried
from rock & the one built with straw is alternately king of nothing
and lord over only one vassal.
Blessed are you who without being named John are none other than John
the Explicit One, the father of air whose children will inherit the
windmills.
Blessed is he who has spent the night with insignificance, because
embellished by lack he will one day be the absence of it,
he who is neighbor to two mouths, he of the trivial mouth missing a tooth,
the man who without pretext had a donkey, a beret, a goat.
Blessed is he who twists his lantern snout in the face of dust's argument &
speaks loud, he who pays for his howl with his life, he who in one
moment is a wolf's speech & a tree of knees.
Blessed is the bird whose song wakes the heart of a mother in sadness's
branches.
Blessed is the amputee with his oxygen violin, the sugar bee that sips the
crust of white liquors.
Blessed is the traveler who wanders in concentric circles & translates the
limit, the fertility of sacrifice, the theology of the moon's medallions.
Blessed is he who immigrates to the border of his love, because he shall be
the strange fruit of Saturday's animal.
Blessed is Rimbaud's skeleton & his influential bird, lone hero of the
cranium's banquet.
Blessed is he who before the allusion of mirrors becomes thoughtful &
lovingly blue he ignores his tears.
Blessed be the immortal spark of the dead, the hat's excuse & its bleat, the
suddenly terminally ill on the palate of death's stage.
Blessed be the wooden swallow that flaps for the child before coming into
the knowledge of sex.
Blessed be the pendulum's air of solitude, the docile under the sun & the
virtue of the blind, the sponge that gives the song of her rain to the
throat.
Blessed be he who leaning on his cane remains all through the night & is
stone of light, stone of age, the two bird's-eyes in zero's necklace.
Blessed be the star that does not remember its horse & has closed its eyelid,
the bitter leprosy that burns in the arteries, the salt of paradise.
Blessed be he who condenses black mournings, because his shall be the last
lightning rope, the first rung on the ladder of descent.
Some Dead
Some dead spin like persuasive ideas around what is thought to be a bond with happiness. They enter bars, ask for cups of oil for the melancholy climate of all that is taken for granted. From their bar stool they keep an eye on the house of Four Seasons, they ask for painless ginger during the after-dinner table-talk of useless pleasures. They know that probability has corrected the encyclopedias, have met the unbound lunatic of creation, they bark in his socks. All the same moral vapor grows cold, all the same each one returns to the miniature of their cravings. Businesses close down, the multitudes begin to lose their hair, the typographer arranges the choirboys of death.
I'm fourteen years old, Gilberto Ursinos has committed suicide with Spring's belt. In hushed tones the laurel grew & the caterpillars' heels were swollen. I can say little else about my idyll with apathy, those without imagination have poor health, so we need to rent another house for the oracles. What we heard was Sanskrit's harvest, the bleating of the invisible judge in the cloud crematorium. The word league had already fallen out of use, that would have been the exact distance between the lover's horseshoe & infinity's beard. The leathers of the morgue surround the birch tree of your thoughts, the tracks of the hearses leave the exemption of literature.
You have been left alone, you no longer hear him cough & the valley drizzles its silence over the sinister terry cloth. Enthusiasm is warning, that bee pitch in the tunnels flooded by an unspeakable vision. Other night species will descend to accompany him in the most secretive & miserly corner, he will marry below ground with bandaged eyes & the sisters-in-law will sing in their aprons. Bird, I too have grown up & most of the people who would have loved us have died off. We have consumed the salts of promise, the queen cats keep birthing in the abandoned lavatories. Each word is a scissor that multiplies, an unknown whose pain has not been made up, dark parents in bitter drinks like a cistern dilating insomnia. Where we are headed reality lacks manners, but even then unbelief in beauty does not authorize soldiers to rebel.
It's the bird in difficulty's oath, the roses made effeminate by death.
