Rodrigo Garcia Lopes
Selected Poems
Translated by Marco
Alexandre de Oliveira, Chris Daniels, Caryn Connelly and the author
THE DETECTIVE DOGS
The detective dogs
in their black capes
never give up —
they sniff dunes, in pairs,
take the beach by surprise
telepathic crabs
the detective dogs
bite the fog of the sea-breeze
investigate
suicidal seagulls
sinister fish hatcheries
forests that meditate
the sea and its mantra
the crash of the waves
always different
they elucidate my
footprints on the sand
terrorist waves
suspect surfers
other dogs
throughout the afternoon
in search of clues
the detective dogs spy on
the beige silex of the dunes
the vertical, kamikaze fall
and splash
and never let themselves be misled
they are tramp detective dogs
they unleash clues that the waves
hide
when they explode
stray dogs, detectives,
they make their rounds on the beach
and also know how to be sly
barking their enigmas
pressuring victims
hidden in the shoal
or disguised as humans
the detective dogs place themselves
in the skin of their prey
and don’t give up on the crabs
they find their alibis
in the lips of the waves
the only evidence
the beach and its necklace of
pearls
the sea is a witness
they also have fun
with the southern wind
ears
between their paws
eyes wide shut
when by day they retrace the
footprints
the black dogs detect
the truth, rotten fish,
get up and keep on
until the afternoon turns itself
in.
(translated by Marco
Alexandre de Oliveira)
NEW YORK
the street serpent drags its booms, raps &
neon lights
devours a real that accumulates its dust
above us, layers
of civilization without end and without exit
and the running over of all emotion
restricted
to a dog, eyeing, perplexed,
sixth avenue
the artificial fog
of the clandestine Korean restaurants
underground
mixes with the traffic, transit, gasp –
escapes from the steam and embraces
the sign, red letters, where you read
DON'T WALK DON'T WALK DON'T WALK
that disappears in the stupid white of a grey
sky
no chance for Shelley, Keats,
no haiku possible here –
except the inhuman screams, anonymous thoughts,
urban grunts
of a man who has just gone mad.
(From Solarium, 1994. Translated by Marco
Alexandre de Oliveira)
CITYSCAPE
Cars advance in our direction; here lies the contemporary epic. Ithaca
on the corner, Odysseus the peddler reading an ad stuck on the ground. Breeze
of horns dazzling him, attracting him to the rush and the grind. From the
synagogue slogans in the multitude of anonymous faces. He is the
transubstantiated hero of other eras, or an ivy plugging the middle of things
with what its steel flora, voracity, reveals: there is no silence, lights trace
lines of flight, your fleeting face behind the glass, stain of detail,
discharge. Everything proceeds by flux and accumulation. Life proliferates,
neon-lights of convenience stores, you under eternal vigilance, and the images,
the images. Minutes beg to be consumed like one more commodity (impossibility)
so you’ve got to be quick, so that death has no way to deaden the interruptions
that scar it until it bleeds so that truth doesn’t have time to install its
lion of geraniums, its leaves of grass and vision. Think of Now and a whole
network installs itself in your brain. This perfume coming from the window
display recalls an idea, and shatters in the instant necessary for time to
stop.
(Unpublished. Translated by Marco Alexandre de
Oliveira)
NAUTILUS
A new beginning. Winter camera in the
blade of morning, sphinxes on the coast, the
Sun,
credential of the sky. The permanent
monologue of the wind. Day and night being
abstractions.
Time,
glass bell jar, triumphant.
The vegetation
Of dunes has resisted everything.
Sunset smile on the cream sand,
Two butterflies are thankful.
Simultaneous planes: nuance
of green and blue in high
definition. Gust of plants
thinking, near esperanto,
and a mute sky of clouds.
The digital blue converses
with the eloquent southern wind.
But the white, by no means, illuminates itself
By some means,
Our Lady of the Dunes. You
don’t look indifferent at all this.
On the contrary, you disappear
Making room for the labyrinth desire, dull
flowers
Or distant ship.
The veranda is a deck
Where bamboo mobiles resonate.
Someone forgot to turn off
the sea machine.
(Unpublished. Translated by Marco Alexandre de
Oliveira)
LIVE
Winter
releases a strange anthology
Clovers of
darkness and lilacs of solitude
Collision
of a satellite of metaphors
Reports of
terrorist narcissists
Provoke
high rates of clouds of space junk
Breaks in
the copulation of bees of absinthe
Imminent
war of broken kisses
And New
Year’s spent on the Nile.
The eye of
the hurricane bears its cross, across the Caribbean
And
connects memory-links of fallen stars
Isolated
beings in entropy
Spell out
and play their heads
While
serial killer rhymes invade the open outcries
And words
rot in the newspapers,
In the
corner of mouths, breathless,
In the
crumpled and forgotten note
Like
everything else.
(From Nômada, 2004,
Translated by Marco Alexandre de Oliveira)
loneliness always appears with
kisses and candies
loneliness pays regular visits to
its closest friends
loneliness looks for winter in
mid-summer
loneliness plays in the sea with
its sugar fingers
loneliness is always smiling to
strangers
loneliness is still thrilled with
old movies on TV
loneliness has dark eyes,
loneliness has blue eyes
loneliness has a fence with a white
rose and a bike
loneliness imagines geishas whose
eyes are glass butterflies
loneliness is crazy and grabs every
beauty contest
loneliness loves hide-and-seek and
hop-scotch
loneliness drinks in my body its
own despair
loneliness collects diaries and
Coltrane records
loneliness wears polka dot pajamas
and broken glasses
loneliness after sex still feels
lonely
loneliness and i are only good
friends
loneliness slits my wrist with a
salt razor
then goes out stoned through the
streets
with a lettuce leaf in its
lapel
(From Solarium, 1994, translated by Marco Alexandre de Oliveira)
IN OPEN MYSTERY
“Reality works
in open mystery”
Macedonio Fernández
The Eye
Behind
What consumes its flame:
These hours without a name
Well beyond language
And darkness.
We are just
A self-awareness
That the eye lends to the ancient seeing,
To the old world,
An excuse for being.
The things it sees
Are more distant
Than they may seem.
Silence: language speaks.
The landscape creaks
Of reality.
Thoughtscape:
In a flash of lightning
The mind drinks a sunset –
Such has been the old law.
To not confide in mirrors,
In spectacles,
And in what the eye doesn’t see.
To be is to perceive, said Berkeley.
It wasn’t always this way:
See, a palm’s length
From paradise,
The closed, precise eye
Envisages the Eye.
Afterimages whinny
Unknown designs,
Its thirst for more:
To rob the real
Of two open eyes.
“The wind breathes
My bodiless thoughts
(The soul gets out of breath)
(My silence sweats).”
It sees itself, the eye, island of
Pure movement now,
Limited between the tongue
And the time.
The panel of the sunset traces
With its hunger for the impossible
Refuge, momentum,
Ideograms of light.
In the eye of the hurricane
Where it
Is calmer.
Double of itself,
Condemned to seeing,
But separate.
Who observes?
The pupil,
Its servant?
If what it sees
Is the real
Then what is this
That moves
At the speed of a wink?
I am not that which it perceives
Since the darkness would then kill me.
Between music and the world,
In the silence of its curvature,
Between the sound and this rain,
Many answers without questions.
The eye, without a past,
Electric flux
Behind
What seems to be,
Anchors its shadows,
Burns in an instant of air.
But, unreachable,
All of this advances,
Escapes you, skin,
Slow papyrus,
Vacuum of voice,
A nothing that vociferates
Between the self that dissolves
– a slit in the silence –
And the eye that luciferates.
(Unpublished. Translated by Marco Alexandre de
Oliveira)
GOOGLE EARTH
This pain is very ancient.
A Colossus of Rhodes, seen from above,
The British Museum, the Taj Mahal,
Sugar Loaf, Atacama, a park in Peru
Once it knew by heart the Bhagavad Gita,
The midday prayer,
The Torah, the Necronomicon,
The inscriptions on Ikhnaton’s tomb.
On the sands it suffered the Grail.
It felt the remorse of the sea.
It looks like Khephra, seen
from the front, and from the side like no one.
Yesterday it seemed more ancient. Today, not even
blue: it doesn’t look like anything.
(Unpublished.
Translated by Marco Alexandre de
Oliveira)
FLEETING
Passage
through a landscape,
a
place of where, yesterday, and when,
how
many words are still missing
in a
mouth full of images.
The
other is the one left on the margin,
on
the fright of a pronoun,
on
the body of a slow wind,
the
other is like a hunger,
a
drifting feather, distant, or almost.
Lost
in its own voyage,
a
bottle with its message,
a
stare enduring on a flower,
nameless,
secreted, gone wild.
Exile,
water one drank on a train,
a
procrastinated party, a play over, vertigo,
the
mind always on some one,
I
other, I all, I none.
(From Visibilia, 1996. Translated by Chris Daniels)
WRITTEN IN A HOTEL
What makes us write
Even while time, the mind’s writing,
Denies that is there to entertain
Until time closes, until light abridges.
The first gesture that detonates it
Is the echo of the word that devours it,
Bones and stuffing on exhibit as it
Comes, of its own impulse the master.
To confuse the registers,
A light in a room announces itself.
And, to become even more lucid,
A distracted hand writes us. And stops.
(From Visibilia, 1996. Translated by Chris
Daniels)
SOLARIUM
slow
disappearance
letters caught on the way
tracks, dry
leaves.
the horizon’s invisible line —
this distance signifying nothing.
the air that is short
the untranslatable fever of silence
that breathes us in
and separates us.
one day, they tried
a taste-without-knowing
life saying yes without wanting to
marine breeze like a blues
noise of airplanes crossing time.
the limit of meaning
establishing itself, temporarily, there,
where the poem’s pumice
shatters
waves abducting
only the steam from our mouths
poluphilosboios
foam
impressed still
imprisioned in spray.
words spread out along this beach —
they are nomads, drunkards —
until we know neither
which of them translates us
nor the mute light that floats upon the waters
and reproduces us
as if we were muses.
(From Solarium,
1994. Translated by Chris Daniels)
betrayed
by
a
winter wind
the
beautiful
butterfly
slowly
flo
wing
like a
flying
Flower
fallen
over
a
frozen
river
(bitter
is
to
fly
so
far
to
die
better
flying forever
(From Solarium, 1994. Originally written in
English)
MEMORY AND REPETITION
Repetition is a form of
change. Change is a form of life. Life is a form of repetition. And the message becomes the vestige of
continuous change. The dance of the
same. A form of repetition. Every memory is anulled as it occurs, and
all we have are tracks, texts, that accumulate upon the waters — that do not stop. The idea of presence perseveres, but
suddenly is mere absence. The water,
river in reverse, in its transparency will not admit that ice has muted it
completely. Silent duel. In the winter, its waters keep flowing,
submerged, protected by it. By skin and
by ice. Under the transparent absence
of the waters where this ex-text writes itself, like snow, and forms a
presence, alien to myself, although invisible like voices — on the surface. That transforms. That transcends. Like the waterfall, whose text is celebrated
and canceled at the same time. Its
writing is a form of disappearance. A
form of life, of change, of repetition.
As if written in lemon revealed only under sunlight. Information is equalized: there is the impression
that nothing happens there. All we
have, I repeat, are tracks, trails through the thicket, false leads. But thousands of eyes pass along that trail,
imperceptible gestures, at every instant.
They converse in an extinct language, the language of ice, of water, of
travelers. In silence they watch the
halo of the moon (another form of repetition). There is nothing new in all this: not as
much as in a poem unwritten. The
aesthetics of disappearance invites all forms of change, like the nomad thoughts
of Nietzsche, eternally repeating its return, which is nothing more than a form
of disappearance. A fiction. Ritual dance of the mind. A fleeting tattoo. A memory of memory. A new
form of repetition.
(From Solarium, 1994. Translated by Caryn C.
Connelly and Chris Daniels)
ZEITGEIST
Knocking out celebrities disguised as penguins
Monitoring the hoard of transactions and the
tricks of climbers
Snaking between stairways nailed with citations
Kicking twilight’s bucket with dawn’s baby
inside
Stepping up strong to a showdown with lies,
treading on calumny’s corns
Accruing stocks in patience and pederast
informers
Pinching salon-tanned folk made of fiberglass and
ultra-high def pixels
Pulling marketers by the ear, taking the
millionaire bishop by the scruff of the neck
Showing his catalog of kung-fu moves to web
designers
Terrifying fashion editors with crucifixes made
of shit
Heading for a knockdown brawl at the florist’s
Shivving the morning and good intentions with
her sharp dagger
Pulverizing manipulators of the genome and
chip-injected models
Giving the third degree to the corrupted files
of the justice department
Assaulting metaphysical popcorn vendors and weekend-artist
bankers
Passing out acid lollipops to literary critics
Blowing up the mouth of reason with
inconsequential denunciations
Sweetly choking the life out of the evening
charged with video cameras & trance music
Preaching fiscal irresponsibility and anthrax
for all
Rifling through the idées fixes-crammed mall
with a cry of jihad
The human bomb walks into the poem.
(From Nômada, 2004. Translated by the author /
Revised by Chris Daniels)
AMERICA # 3
Deserts
respect time.
See how
stones meditate.
The
sands are discreet disciples,
Insolently
corroding
the
bones of their master.
The
climax of the artifice is in the blue—
Total
landscape without vanishing points.
A
wrinkle becomes an etching:
Turn it
over and you have a desert. A Monet
canvas,
close-up, from behind— with
neither
color, water lilies, nor beginning.
The wary
coyote watches us: let it lie down
among
the stones that never ask us anything,
and maps
erase themselves, and be lost.
We have
lost all sense of direction: roads are all.
A
cactus’s only diversion: counting roadrunners.
See its
dust crossing the landscape.
The
echoes we release do not return.
MYTHÓS
Barefoot,
the mind finds itself more ample,
establishes
its fleeting empire.
It doesn’t
lead you – narrative repeated
leaving
threads along the way –
but instead
giving birth to abrupt cuts
on the
porch:
The quickly
written note, spasm in the diaphragm, detail of logs.
To give
continuity is to deny chance – an example
of miracle
and synchronicity, when the dream
beguiles
the face and becomes vision.
The
immediate objective is: fusion.
The self
doesn’t take over things.
Let them
(your idle souls)
Call,
stall, until the end, fall.
The
simultaneous history of things
One day
will tell your fable.
(From Nômada, translated by the author)
PATRIOTIC GAMES
Rain in the cup of Sha. Courtyards are empty, skies simulating their
blues etc.
Simile --- smile ----- simulacrum ----------
missile:
The paper sucks ink, drags its substance & dazes
insignificances in a stormy surface, sure-fire.
Black Island.
Signs pulse. Back to the future.
We open envelopes with anxiety: find only blank
sheets.
Wave, syllable breaking there; lip’s edge.
Think of truth, chimera, while you finger the first
leaves of grass.
Exhaustion, suspended phones, off the hooks . .
. . . . .
The ego erases itself, sous rature, sutures itself;
gazes at the mirror and sees only its back. Thalassa — ad infinitum.
S.
Dry dream, sour rain, joints of
abyssinian/discontinuous prose. . .
. . . .
An abyss.
Language in zig-zag, cornered by a zugzwang, scuds
over a neutral zone.
One zap, and the moon dissolves. A zoo from zen to zoom? Zeitgeist?
Polaroid logic.
Expectations & disappearances.
You focus and suffocate, unnoticing
the snake’s venom, the next sentence’s moment.
(From Solarium, 1994, translated by Chris Daniels)
Tempe, Arizona, 1992
_______________________________________________
OPERATION
ENDURING DUST: A DIARY
Freely translated
by Chris Daniels
Wind scrapes the
desert raw. Space mimes blood in the caged thirst of the piggish smile. One
year after. GPS & bloodpuddle, barbarians, dry blood flits, as in the
beginning, before the storm of high-tech rhetorical corpses and daisy cutters.
The stepmother of all chimeras.
SOMEONE IS MANIPULATING THESE EVENTS
_________________________________________________
CANDID CAMERA
celebrates
MANIFEST DESTINY
_________________________________________________
BREAKING NEWS
first image
his eyes play hanna-
barbera ping-pong
he tries words on
with a slight smile
while unbeknownst
to him a woman
(faceless)
carefully coifs
the graying hair
of Mr. War
_________________________________________________
here
lancers are free
and all fire
is friendly
TEXACO. One word
says it all. Will the real president please stand up and sneer when he collects
his per annum? This is not a poem.
.
.
. .
.
.
.
. ;
.
. .
.
.
.
.
(ack-ack)
the only thing visible this time of morning in the midst of storm filth
blood stench of meat delirious Baghdad my folks in Oklahoma and the decibels
madness we're going live when's this gonna end a mine ah-h-h
Take that. Take more of that.
Call it preventive action .
_________________________________________________
no beauty
where meat on
exhibit
— in open rot
proof positive
no beauty
where evil so
human
Splintered water, milk from a
crushed brain, discharge
of hours and the sordid broth
overflowing the trough
in the Bush wallow. Farewell, liberal individualism.
Farewell, leaves of grass.
Swordstorm.
Surveillance systems. Cyberterrorism.
Now it's your turn.
_________________________________________________
Lacquer moon: inscription on dark side: MADE IN
USA.
The plane took off for Yesterday. No need to
wait.
“. . . in a minute.”
“we believe he's disposed of his WMD's, but”
A sound of waves exits a shop in Basra.
Explosions. An arm.
The real yet another barb ripping through the
galactic epidermis.
Black Hole God. Wind rattles the south.
Fallujah.
What place paid, its price, its piece, each
false movement toward one more beyond? — or will we never leave the place?
In a single drop, quarks explode their effects
through cranial porcelain, a universe .
_________________________________________________
Our informants can't tell us where to find
Allah. Helás.
_________________________________________________
FRIENDLY FIRE
he photographed
while
he killed
ground level
like me
this image
word
bled
like me that
rosy
trigger-fingered
dawn
like me this dead
smile
without a face
_________________________________________________
Muezzins wound the pocked Bagdhad sky
More beauty in this
Or in a dreadful burning slum
In a bullet lost
at the seashore?
Nobody is immune.
If poetry is war waged by other means,
In a face-off with the word,
Why are we not on the battlefield?
_________________________________________________
Death comes to you
Live in the comfort
Of your living death
_________________________________________________
A surgical strike
To the base of your spine
And your land is gone—
Preventive action.
An attack on your
Uncovered nape
And thus, o secret,
Your code deciphers me.
_________________________________________________
An assault taken
Troops in an advance which
Through the desert of the false
Coagulates in their super-
Hero outfits,
Blood gone hard and dry.
_________________________________________________
“Time is a matter of victory.”
Truth is a matter of embedding.
_________________________________________________
This is not being filmed.
_________________________________________________
Dance and dance and dance, Saddam.
_________________________________________________
red cabbage
asunder
head with no face
iraqi kid
blood and silence
in operation
enduring
dust
_________________________________________________
Translator's notes:
The term embedding has nothing to do
with Polanyi's notion of embeddedness.
With this leash, I thee wed.
black
peonies
serene
nearly
dry
doves
warming
in a
remnant
of
sun
a
plant
struggles
to
break
the branch
ants
drag
a
bee
still
alive
winter
pilfers
the flower
the
fruit’s color
(gestures
& waving
of
shadows
do
not console)
the
evening goes by
crawls
and leaves
a
silver trail
(From Solarium, 1994, translated by Chris
Daniels)
All
has sense
If
senses are
All
we sense
All
so dense
Which
is senseless
To
settle here
Misleading
(From Solarium, 1994, translated by Chris
Daniels)
THOTH
Storm Reality Studio, and retake the universe
William S. Burroughs
\
Noises have sex with the superior things of the
Immense, Sodium, silences reducing noises to their nexus, none. The Immense
turns itself around with its Kama Sutra, its Wittgenstein, its walkman that
knocks them dead at the festivals of Thoth. Nearly immense, ruined Angkor
blooming Vietnams, the sea sets traps for scars, and the skin is a pharaoh
ticket.
\
The river trembled in membrane, in the brahmin’s
mind, in the scale of the shadow, in the soul’s pomp: icy cold; a prise reveals
dense valleys — smells of death: crystals... Life is exiled
here, liquid... And as for content, we might say it has to do with with an
alchemical process incessant as the sound that blows out of rivers or rain of
meteors on a lake, the shadow of Iago, and this animal night.
\
The invisible’s scintillae, splinters of Osiris,
silence denuding the secret made of dry petals; rain’s paradox refining its
metals. All is made light when light liquefies into sound, rain out of season.
Signs. Serpents spiral in their skin, leaving there their double exposure, in
the transference of ruins the eye reunites, and ruins. Doped by the opium of
caring, with the tenuous distance of a doctor out of position, he razored the
precise, Egyptian thought of a total dream. Apotheosis of laughter, Osiran
rivers, sun: jewels in skulls and bones that go down the Nile. How does this
become that? They, the modern ones, that bite the bizarre flesh and snatch up
their modest ration, their Reality Studio.
(From
Polivox, 2001, translated by Chris
Daniels)
YAMA
Your profile the green pregnancy of magic wood
Through which soars the immense shadow of the sky
(Unpublished,
Translated by the author and Christopher Merrill)
WINTERVERSES
oyster
coloured sky
and sun’s
clouded
pearl
(Unpublished,
translated by the author)
MINUTE
Here you come
Acting like the wind
As if nobody saw you
Here you come dubbing thought
Like a feeling beach
Near laughter, hazard, onset
Of the waves astonish’s dunes,
There where muting speaks louder
And where a moment commemorates
With a minute of silence.
(From Visibilia,
1996. Translated by Chris Daniels)
c:\polivox.doc
For me everything disintegrated into parts, those parts again into parts;
no longer would anything let itself be encompassed by one idea. Single words
floated round me, they congealed into eyes which stared at me and into which I
was forced to stare back-whirlpools which gave me vertigo and, reeling
incessantly, led into the void
Hugo von Hoffmannsthal
cut the word lines
Williams S. Burroughs
The bit of noise, the small random element, transforms one system of
order into another.
Michel Serres
On-line.
Shhh. “Epic is a poem
including
history.” Too much.
“What if a
Health Plan
Could
express
Your
Individuality?
You’re not like everybody else.
Your
individuality is something we like
and
understand. Mean-
while, false
flowers, carrion,
black
snow. “I
don’t look for what I find.”
Language
escapes:
Since when
is ocean
Sky?
Access denied.
FOR MANY,
STORMS BEYOND COMPREHENSION/ “they saw
tornados
threw
their cars around like toys and cows flying in the backyards ...” This, the
American
Dream. Rainpetals, strange postcard
Ticket in
obscure
Esperanto —
From
Beyond: Cézanne: “The landscape thinks itself through me. I am its conscience.”
Mute
books, red
of trees spread in fake sentences, and the desert devours time.
Shift
What makes
of Dell
The ideal choice? Dell
Always aim at
offering
The perfect
combination of power, performance
And price.
THe cLOser
We lOOk aT a
WoRd tHe
FUrThEr iT
fAcEs Us.
All rights reserved @
Leave your
message after the beep.
Sour
cherries: once, flowers.
“If a lion
could talk
he
wouldn’t understand what we roar.”
Ideology
is language dressed up as transparency.
Egaugnal: slowly I
will tell you who you are. Medicine or poison.
Man is not
contemporary with his origins.
Let’s turn
up the volume of the language.
This page
is under construction. Zip!
Nobody
hears thoughts like here. Now
you don’t
need me anymore, now form
is an
extension of content. Bapel.
To swim
on this
foam, virgin verse, pampa snowed with
black
walls.
“Poetry is
the supreme virtual reality, girlfriend.”
World.
Wordless. Into which we enter
stripped.
This is
the way the world ends,
not with a
shot,
but
without a meaning.
Resistance
of Materials. “This is gonna
hurt me
more than it hurts you.”
The
sentence is out of focus.
“When you
dissect it, you kill it.”
“Pain is
impossible to describe.”
The dance
of the duende in the forest of signs.
“If we
always write only
that which
we already know
the field
of knowledge
would
never be extended.” The weather turned, this
page (from
pangere, to grasp, fix, join)-morning.
Just
because,
“a doubt
that doubted everything would no longer
be
a doubt.”
And
what
changes after everything. Changes,
after
everything. The dance of the duende
in the
forest of signs. Madame Yahoo,
there’s
nothing epic in lightning a cigarette:
or perhaps
there is, like the heroic act of
opening
the door and taking out the trash.” The difficult thing
is being
able to jump over the wall.” This line of lies.
The hymen
is testing the extended memory.
A hot bath
is the conquest of Egypt.
Who said
that? I was
your
amulet in the midst of the riot:
I
protected you from war, goddess —
I was the
whetted blade in Thoth’s hand
in the
midst of the riot.
The fall
of the pen on the carpet is an autumn dawn.
Skies of
liquid crystal.
Iron
filings form a magnetized rose.
Remnants
of conversations are our prophecies.
A kiss is
the conquest of Egypt.
Each
morning you have to break the dead rubble afresh so as to reach the living warm
seed.
Vox, Vak,
vaccum. Who knows, man
is not
contemporary with its image.
Let’s turn
up the volume of the language.
In
American matinees they teach us to watch a film
in the old
style: in silence.
With time,
we become
Invisible:
Sub
verborum tegmine vera laten, or
behind the
veil of words, the truth. Voices in the Mind’s room?
“But we
awake at the same time to ourselves and to things”
“Appearance’s
arduous path.”
THE EYE
OPENS. THE EYE OPENS AND DIVIDES.
Air, to
articulate,
like an
animal leaving its nest.
Cinema of
the Grotesque taught us
to
configure an action, black instant, not a reflection
of reality
An apple
floats in light: this its meaning.
(“we accept
credit cards”)
that moves
as one breaths, immediate,
while it
lOOks at spirals Of time, rings Of smOke.
There’s no escaping it.
(Tempe, Arizona, 1990. From Polivox, 2000. Translated by Chris
Daniels)
Everything in space
Is past. Time,
pure distance,
deep slow blue.
Even the shortest
rain
falls on this world.
(From Visibilia, 1996. Translated by Chris
Daniels)
For years he’s been selling his rotten
fish
his souflée of entrails
to humorless vegetarians.
For ages he lectures
On chaos’ dialect
Sells orchids written with
his blood
to vampires who are afraid of red.
For centuries he practices
the extinct art of pluviometry
fabricates useless ideas
counts the cars in the corner
composing a long and atrocious poem.
For minutes he calls
To an answering machine
That repeats, strange, imagine,
The recording of his own voice.
(Translated by Chris Daniels)
AMERICA
# 3
Deserts
respect time.
See how
stones meditate.
The
sands are discreet disciples,
Insolently
corroding
the
bones of their master.
The
climax of the artifice is in the blue—
Total
landscape without vanishing points.
A
wrinkle becomes an etching:
Turn it
over and you have a desert. A Monet
canvas,
close-up, from behind— with
neither
color, water lilies, nor beginning.
The wary
coyote watches us: let it lie down
among
the stones that never ask us anything,
and maps
erase themselves, and be lost.
We have
lost all sense of direction: roads are all.
A
cactus’s only diversion: counting roadrunners.
See its
dust crossing the landscape.
The
echoes we release do not return.
(translated by Chris Daniels and Caryn Connelly)
OSTRANENIE, a road poem
Taken by the strange logic of the age
I ask a lift from the family of hippies
That has for as its strangest hobbies
To not tell the hours, just the cuckoos,
To exchange kisses as if exchanging blows,
To curse like a band of sailors,
To get hit in the face assuming it is a hiccup.
They ask my nose if we are close,
Erase landscapes, eat sausages,
And then talk talk talk as a mad sect
Until they are without voice and subject.
I get off, in an old Russian village.
(From Nômada,
2004, Translated by Chris Daniels)
POLIVOX
There is no voice to be mine
on this morning of being awakened by the washing
machine,
birds in cages made of wind and Villa-Lobos.
Other voices intersect with it and mix
In the cataract of sentences which I am writing
and which slowly watch, and recognize me.
And other breath of silence reanimates us. Tongues
collide in the toxin of islands
in the exile of all paths
(which, however, do not fork. They
hide — in the yesterday wherein they
drain —
In a riot of echoes, reflections in a grotto).
Would poetry be the art of listening?
(From Polivox, 2001. Translated by Chris Daniels)
IN THE HOUR OF THE WORLD
To rhyme is to
awaken sounds of syllables, words
as primordially, to
surprise them
In their secret den:
wherein none stands.
Freed from the
senses, neither sibyls,
nor slaves, portable
instants,
To impassion these
fruits of speeches,
ramified in their
echoes, their inverted flight,
nomads lost in an
uncertain desert
under this heat that
sweetens each color, washes
with strangeness
this severe passion,
under the bass that
marks the melody
of the first midday.
(Unpublished.
Translated by the author)
UPON
AN OLD SAYING
Be like sandalwood, that perfumes the wounding axe.
I will say again what once was said
So the mind will never forget
That one day our lips, leaves, were made
Grass, rapid sky, velvet and dense fog.
This smoke in the void seems
the other, life, that
lasts as lightning bolts last, quartz
a pupil dilates and irradiates.
Who would say, for instance,
that under the flesh of incense,
in the evening’s duramen,
the sandalwood inhales
and causes no
scandal.
(From Visibilia,
1996. Translated by Chris Daniels)
POLICE ROMANCE
The dead man bathed in the moon's
flashlight.
For the detective, no insight
Except the dark swamp, the fallen
corpse,
The thick blood, and the report
By the mean faced policeman
That was now holding a lantern
While he interrogated the black
eyed blonde
Who worked for a Greek restaurant
About the money and the strange
notes in the car,
About the strange grimace of a
smile, the blood on her scarf.
And before the song on the radio is
over
He says: "Only a miracle can
save her".
In his hands, the torn letter, a
bottle of whiskey.
But a verdict is still a little too
risky.
Nothing was clear in the
statements, of how this broad
Was found on a full moon by the
side of the road:
"You gotta pay for what you
cannot say",
She said, right as he turned away
From a kiss that would have been
fatal.
The moon enhanced her crystals.
And then a moment of silence
As the crickets punctuated a sign.
She said: "The clues are
everywhere
In your diary, on the sixteenth, in
red, on the calendar".
While the detective searched the
night
The blonde poured something white
Into his bottle. "In this
profession, you need time
To solve this almost perfect
crime".
She said nothing, or almost
nothing, only heard
As the truth was revealed in every
word.
At this point, everything seemed so
clear
As he said: “Have a drink, now, my
dear”.
(Unpublished, Translated by Marco
Alexandre de Oliveira)
THE LAST JOURNEY
He stepped on the beach
for the first time
in ages —
Seagulls watched him.
Aroma of algae.
The burning, saline Southern wind.
Odysseus came down
from the raft murmuring
something to himself
in an almost extinct dialect.
He put up the oars, a few fish,
to the music of a loudspeaker
versus a salmon sunset.
Afterwards, he saw the weak lights
flickering in the town houses.
A sea-breeze of marijuana reached his
nostrils.
Funk.
Roaring laughter.
None of the fishermen recognized him.
Penelope had never existed.
That was not his legend.
Ithaca had never existed.
Odysseus turned to the beach without
history
and said nothing:
he lit a cigarette and
contemplated
the absurd dark blue of the nocturnal
sea
versus the untiring white lines
of the breaking of the waves.
(Unpublished, translated by
Marco Alexandre de Oliveira)
You touch me
like someone changing
clothes
You provoke me
and tease me, this
sweet distraction
of mine
Why hurry
you
woman in the crowd?
(From Solarium, 1994, translated by the author)
DARK SEPTEMBER
The
lightness and fleeting shade
That things
make when they fall
Before we
can detain it all
Things fall
so softly at this edge
Or, when,
with our eyes closed,
(a wall
where dark is white and murine sky)
The river’s
eyelids open: a landscape.
They fall
over a river, among branches, tense
Sprouts,
carcasses of nameless flowers, scraps of nets,
Whispers
into brute bush
Between the
thump of mouths and foggy faces,
Flowerfly,
orchidea, thoughtulips.
On the
outside it was reality.
On the
inside a city
Made of
gestures and movements,
Shade,
shock, strangeness, thoughts.
We followed
to its falls,
But without
any hope of finding falls
The dream
was a nightmare
Of bloody
reefs, baroque walls
Contesting
the sea, the star as we in struggle
Against the
lights of the metropolis.
There was a
mysterious parallel, a world
Between the
simple fall of a paper leaf
And the
quick recollection which in a second
Took us
somewhere, zoom, corner of sky.
The fall
left only shouts & blasts,
A dense
cloud of flesh and dust in the sky, a screen
Not that
tenderness that inhabited your voice
(the
feeling that something has collapsed)
Solitude,
reef, star.
(from
Nômada, 2004, translated by Chris Daniels)
TRANCE
MUSIC
Doesn’t miss the beat between these night riffs
more distant than a DJ in trance
coarse voice follows bass lines, lower the ire,
saunters between codes & grooves
amidst stars & champagnes.
Bit by bit
The heat catches you.
as taken
by surprise, sounds,
and the times it
corners us
or suspend
whitenesses
with the charm of a scream.
Smiling cornfields, only this doesn’t seem to
become a commodity.
Liquid ladies, maybe, or icons that dissolve by the
touch of
The Delete Cartago key
for the dream is only fast
and the solo genuine only
if it arrives on the first
intuitive corner and if
by syntactical turns
the eccentric Mr. Meaning comes together,
taxiing
whatever life is, creek’s tension,
and whatever it is not also,
cherry tea under a moon blooming
in the four corners of this song.
(From Nômada, 2004,
translated by the author RGL)
WHILE
Tongue, strange trip
through lost paradises, esperantos,
Footpaths, lullabies
of temples hidden
by seacoast
in dense wood, while
in state of thought
landscape evaporates
into a self almost silence
gap between what it was
and what it will be
time inside time
clues of collapsed night
giddiness over trails of light
another autumn and your clear
and secrete gestures
while flowers of language
fall on our feet.
(Unpublished, translated by the author)
I wish to dig
The shadow of a thought.
To see dew’s arrow
Bloom
The
candle relighting
With the wind
But with no reason of mine;
With inner eyes.
To reach the season.
And to wish this thought-state
Rolling out from myself.
Seeing stars in tinted glass
Agates in neon lights.
(From Nômada, 2004, translated
by the author)
IN
SUNUMBRA
Shadow’s dribble, breeze’s discharge, face
echoing its roaring wave, petrified
in the sparkling night without
face, room’s rough landscape,
desert’s void, second silences
mind forgotten in its thirst
while light does not decide if it
devours the fleeting representations
— language’s closed windows –
or shoots proverbs that find
their target only by falling far
from the mosques of the (besieged) city.
(From Nômada, 2004, translated
by the author)
Gnawed by envy
the moth
destroys
the dry butterfly
(trans RGL)
MINDSCAPE
Void’s
temples
Receive the
rest
Of seconds’
pregnancy.
Nail and
flesh
Sky and
tree
The wind
crests.
Each
gesture
Of silk
deciphers
The Hades
of Hate
Where heavy
levitates.
Man
entranced
Corners
nothingness
The
bloodless night
In every
speech-scaffold.
Darkness
casting
From the
other margin
Of my
arteries —
Image,
matter.
(From Nômada, 2004, translated by the author)
NEWFOUNDLAND
1
Thought’s voice
(wind’s torturer)
Tongue’s sight
In every India
Mood’s cuts
Corners each fear in time
To make, discreetly,
A little miracle.
2
Seagulls
return kamikaze
tsunami
skies and
new
figure mute
from
gesture and its reflection,
spray
of images
word
mutating into thought.
3
UTOPIA VILLAGE its lines of far-off trees merging in
the twilight
Free access to immense towers incapable of naming the
invisible
In the theater of your desire camped
scattered in gesture’s syntax
which escapes from the net in the limit of space
Side by side times kisses and mixes here in this
non-place
to avail the grass
against
darkness
4
In vegetable pages
Day with minted lips
Shoots its first gust
of thought.
We survive, are
Here, though
The ball-point insists on failing
To speak, astonished still,
About blues
Electrified by iceness.
It sees itself
On
the other side
In a foreign, unread tongue.
Transparent,
It blinks to itself.
5
Combo, cobra, quick, aquarium, afternoon,
Air nirvanes the flesh, this, jets and stars,
Sleep of the grass, shadow cloud, cat all steps:
Language is our reality.
The real’s ash, renouncement’s rose, assault’s
presaging,
gape’s
fencing, vulgari eloquio, fright’s
coloratura.
Dribble and blood in an agape shadow.
This is my raw material.
(From Nômada, 2004, translated by the author. Revised
by Chris Daniels)
BHANG
Without knowing it, you just traveled in time.
You weren’t here before, now you are, and in some manner already
participating in a crime. Click. And the telepathic future writes your
confession on the nude back of time, surface of Venus, white Sahara darkness,
footprints being erased, a name and a face without a face set loose on the
wind. The instantaneous vision that
makes us discover the unknown not in a distant hidden land, but in the heart of
the really immediate. Time as
Water. Mandalas of states, perceptions,
mirrorisms. A silence of shipwrecked
watches. A silence of shipwrecked
watches.
(From Nômada, 2004, translated by Marco
Alexandre de Oliveira)
AMERICA
Stranger, your name is solitude: the idiom
You speak is
from other neigborhood. You curse,
But it
doesn’t spark, neither this dark
Water that
the moon, now a D, disperses.
Your silence
is a kind of exile:
I know that
because I myself err
By
intransitive and subjetless streets
Of this land
where everything is perfect.
But it is in this strangeness, a countryless
desert in my mind,
Whitin’s exile, even outside,
Where I most
feel nearby.
Listen to how soft is this girl
Who whispers
a lie into your ear:
Ire and
delirium, simultaneous, cristal clear.
That is what
made this lyre.
(Unpublished,
translated by the author)
at the Hermitage)
KHADJIBEY
In
just a sec will be rain
In
Troy, Tokio, New York City
And
lightning will be a touch
And
seeing closer to being.
In a minute will be snowing
Over Rio, Ohio, over
Nineveth,
The sun will shine at
midnight now
Just for you to say good
morning
In a while will be blood
On swamps, the Ganges, or
Sagres,
And rain and blood and snow,
surprise:
Will decode Odessa.
(Unpublished, translated by the author at The Hermitage)
MANASOTA KEY
In the pages of the sea
pelicans in line
write the shadows of their
breasts
almost touching a wave.
The sun drafts
its ruby-red farewell notes,
every sunset.
Dolphins, their fins
tell the sea's rough ways
over the prairie of the whales.
Cormorants register their
kamikaze writing,
suicidal, invisible for
instants.
In the pages of the sand
(whose shells are its
collected works)
black fossiles of shark’s
teeth
write the autobiography
of two million years.
Tracks of a raccoon
write its adventure novel
from the dune to the road.
A crab leaves its signature
over the tracks of an SUV
tire.
Bottle with a message, a
thumb drive
with the history of a wreck.
In the pages of the sky
Ancestral clouds and
supernovas describe
their travels over the world,
infinite.
Hurricanes hit best sellers
Over the Gulf of Mexico
while autumn leaves
calligraph in the air
precise ideograms,
the wind’s memoir.
Satellites trace haikus of
light.
The lemon-yellow moon
describes its solemn shine
Over Florida palm trees.
I don’t write anything.
THE
GREEN FLASH
Life,
you gave me so much,
I
cannot pay you back,
you
gave me the endless sea soundtrack
gave
me this salmon sunset
gave
me what no god
ever
gave
me.
I
can only pay you back
with
my daily quota of wonder,
my
minutes of silence,
spasms
of joy,
while
you create.
I
can only promise you
to
be your loyal, privileged biographer,
your
translator:
while,
day by day,
you
go on writing the same beauty,
tireless,
unreachable
muse.
With
your clouds like shifting gods
with
the sea machine smashing our ears
with
the red tide which burns our eyes
with
the sun that still lets a last surprise:
in
the infinite and clear sea’s horizon
the
giant coin of the sun dives but leaves
its
gradiente miracle:
over
its golden head
in
a matter of seconds
a
green flash.
Rodrigo Garcia LOPES (poet, translator; Brazil)
has published five collections of poetry, including Solarium (1994), Polivox
(2001) and Nômada (2004). His poems,
essays and interviews have been widely published and anthologized, including in
Os Cem Melhores Poemas Brasileiros do
Século 20 [The Best 100 Brazilian Poems of the Twentieth Century]. His
second CD, Canções do Estúdio Realidade [Songs from Reality Studio), a new book
of poems and a first novel, the detective story O Trovador [The Troubadour] are forthcoming in 2013. He translates
from the English (Whitman, Laura Riding, Plath) and from the French (Rimbaud,
Apollinaire). A freelance journalist and translator, he co-edits the arts
magazine Coyote; he also performs his
poems and songs regularly around Brazil. In 2012 he was selected to represent
Brazil in the International Writing Program at University of Iowa (USA). In
2012 he was selected for residency at The Hermitage Artist Retreat. E-mail:
rgarcialopes@gmail.com
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