terça-feira, 30 de abril de 2013

Richard Blanco - Photo of a Man on Sunset Drive: 1914, 2008


Groundbreaking Ceremony, City of South Miami, Sunset Drive Improvements

And so it began: the earth torn, split open
by a dirt road cutting through palmettos
and wild tamarind trees defending the land
against the sun. Beside the road, a shack
leaning into the wind, on the wooden porch,
crates of avocados and limes, white chickens
pecking at the floor boards, and a man
under the shadow of his straw hat, staring
into the camera in 1914. He doesn't know
within a lifetime the unclaimed land behind
him will be cleared of scrub and sawgrass,
the soil will be turned, made to give back
what the farmers wish, their lonely houses
will stand acres apart from one another,
jailed behind the boughs of their orchards.
He'll never buy sugar at the general store,
mail love letters at the post office, or take
a train at the depot of the town that will rise
out of hundred-million years of coral rock
on promises of paradise. He'll never ride
a Model-T puttering down the dirt road
that will be paved over, stretch farther and
farther west into the horizon, reaching for
the setting sun after which it will be named.
He can't even begin to imagine the shadows
of buildings rising taller than the palm trees,
the street lights glowing like counterfeit stars
dotting the sky above the road, the thousands
who will take the road everyday, who'll also
call this place home less than a hundred years
after the photograph of him hanging today
in City Hall as testament. He'll never meet
me, the engineer hired to transform the road
again, bring back tree shadows and birdsongs,
build another promise of another paradise
meant to last another forever. He'll never see
me, the poet standing before him, trying
to read his mind across time, wondering if
he was thinking what I'm today, both of us
looking down the road that will stretch on
for years after I too disappear into a photo.

in Place of Mind, published by Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2011.

domingo, 28 de abril de 2013

Penélope escreve - José Miguel Silva


É mais que certo: não sinto a tua falta.

Fiquei a tarde toda a arrumar os teus papéis,
a reler as cinco cartas que me foste endereçando
na semana que perdemos: tu no Alentejo,
eu debaixo de água. Fui depois regar as rosas
que deixaste no quintal. Sempre só e sem
carpir o meu estado (porque não me fazes falta),
pus o disco da Chavela que me deste no Natal
e comecei a preparar o teu prato preferido.
Cozinhar fez-me perder o apetite; por isso
abri uma garrafa de maduro e não me custa
confessar-te que não sinto a tua falta.
Por volta das dez horas, obriguei-me a recusar
dois convites pra sair (aleguei androfobia)
e estou neste momento a recortar a tua imagem
(não me fazes falta) nas fotos que possuo de nós dois,
de maneira a castigar com o cesto dos papéis
a inábil idiota que deixou que tu te fosses.

Ulisses já não mora aqui, &etc, 2002

terça-feira, 23 de abril de 2013

Luís Filipe Parrado

Com Unhas e Dentes

Estar vivo
é abrir uma gaveta
na cozinha,
tirar uma faca de cabo preto,
descascar uma laranja.
Viver é outra coisa:
deixas a gaveta fechada
e arrancas tudo
com unhas e dentes,
o sabor amargo da casca,
de tão doce,
não o esqueces.


Entre a Carne e o Osso, Língua Morta, 2012

domingo, 21 de abril de 2013

Amores de Verão - José Duarte


Amores de Verão


Aguardava sempre os meses de Verão para conhecer as miúdas novas que vinham da grande cidade passar uns dias à terra dos avós. Depois de as conhecer esperava o momento certo para começar a sofrer antecipando a sua partida.


De Dias Úteis, a sair um dia destes.

quarta-feira, 17 de abril de 2013

Just Kids - Patti Smith




The following day was my sister Linda's birthday, but there was to be no party for her. Stephanie had taken a turn for the worse and my father and mother went to a hospital to give blood. When they returned my father was crying and my mother knelt down beside me to tell me Stephanie had died. Her grief was quickly replaced with concern as she felt my forehead. I was burning with fever. 

Our apartment was quarantined. I had scarlet fever. In the fifties it was much feared since it often developed into a fatal form of rheumatic fever. The door to our apartment was painted yellow. Confined to bed, I could not attend Stephanie 's funeral. Her mother brought me her stacks of comic books and her cigar box of charms. Now I had everything, all her treasures, but I was far too ill to even look at them. It was then that I experienced the weight of sin, even a sin as small as a stolen skater pin. I reflected on the fact that no matter how good I aspired to be, I was never going to achieve perfection. I also would never receive Stephanie 's forgiveness. But as I lay there night after night, it occurred to me that it might be possible to speak with her by praying to her, or at least ask God to intercede on my behalf. 

Robert was very taken with this story, and sometimes on a cold, languorous Sunday he would beg me to recount it. "Tell me the Stephanie story," he would say. I would spare no details on our long mornings beneath the covers, reciting tales of my childhood, its sorrow and magic, as we tried to pretend we weren't hungry. And always, when I got to the part where I opened the jewelry box, he would cry, "Patti, no . . ." 

We used to laugh at our small selves, saying that I was a bad girl trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad. Through the years these roles would reverse, then reverse again, until we came to accept our dual natures. We contained opposing principles, light and dark. 

I was a dreamy somnambulant child. I vexed my teachers with my precocious reading ability paired with an inability to apply it to anything they deemed practical. One by one they noted in my reports that I daydreamed far too much, was always somewhere else. Where that somewhere was I cannot say, but it often landed me in the corner sitting on a high stool in full view of all in a conical paper hat. 

I would later make large detailed drawings of these humorously humiliating moments for Robert. He delighted in them, seeming to appreciate all the qualities that repelled or alienated me from others. Through this visual dialogue my youthful memories became his.


Just Kids, Patti Smith, Bloomsbury, 2010

segunda-feira, 15 de abril de 2013

A poem by Harryette Mullen - Wipe That Simile Off Your Aphasia


as horses as for
as purple as we go
as heartbeat as if
as silverware as it were
as onion as I can   
as cherries as feared
as combustion as want
as dog collar as expected
as oboes as anyone
as umbrella as catch can
as penmanship as it gets
as narcosis as could be
as hit parade as all that
as icebox as far as I know
as fax machine as one can imagine
as cyclones as hoped
as dictionary as you like
as shadow as promised
as drinking fountain as well
as grassfire as myself
as mirror as is
as never as this

Sleeping with the Dictionary, University of California Press, 2002

quarta-feira, 10 de abril de 2013

Simão Valente - Miniatura


I

Passei pela casa de só paredes,
pensei que podia ser ouvido o
murmúrio mas sem se saber de
onde vinha. Junto ao caminho
as flores brancas que eu usava
como exemplo por ninguém
recordar que são brancas: o
lilás das pontas reluz. Depois
o portão, partido, pilares duplos
de que antes se entrava por onde
agora se passa. Sem entrave não
pode haver ingresso, ainda que
aquela casa já não esteja lá.

Simão Valente, Miniatura, Artefacto, 2013.

sexta-feira, 5 de abril de 2013

quarta-feira, 3 de abril de 2013

Cave dive - Joe Dunthorne


Every sixteen metres of depth is equivalent to one alcoholic drink.


– Mauro Bertolini, The Diver’s Handbook

He remembers being six, lying on his back beneath a kitchen chair, gazing up at his father’s unmapped nostrils, his mother’s skirt riffling past like a spotted eagle ray. Underneath the dining table, he found pencil marks: a quarter-circle and two words underscored. Possible Extension. Back then, it was a code or perhaps the solution to a code. On the cave bed, it takes a blue whale’s long blink to fathom what one plus one turns in to. The sky peers down from blue-green slots like the lamp fittings of his youth. His slow mind thinks time is just another surface, he can pass through the swirling halocline that keeps us from our pasts: the fresh and the preserved. Back in his father’s study, pouring a bag of marbles across the rug. In the glow from the tentacled lampshade, he holds up his Bosser, sees himself swimming in its spiral reef. Letting drift his aqualung, he is either young or drunk. From his lips he scatters balls of glass.
Retirado daqui.