It is a duration that does not exist, yet it weighs. I look at the clock and see not time, but the white, vibrating marrow of silence. Can one touch the thing-in-itself before the hand moves? To seek the essence is a fatigue, a hunger that does not want to be satisfied. Life. I say the word and it escapes me like a secret I have forgotten. It is the dog, with its wet nose and its terrifyingly pure gaze; it is the giant squid, heavy and cold in the abyss where no eye sees; it is the goldfish, a … Continue reading Thirty minutes…

My dear, Who has whispered such untruths into your ear? In what cold, sterile corner did they find the breath to say your skin was anything less than beautiful? To speak is often to err; to listen to the wrong voice is to lose one’s own pulse. Look upon the earth. Not the surface that men walk upon, but the primordial, teeming depth. See yourself there. You are the color of the fertile ground, that dark, humid silence from which all flowers are forced to spring, almost painfully, into the light. It is a mystery of hunger and satiation. In … Continue reading The Silent Birth of the Earth

Sometimes, the poems build a home for themselves. They settle quietly in the kitchen of our bellies or take a seat in the doorway of our throats, dangling their legs like children in the sun. But other times, these poems aren’t such polite guests. They spread through the blood like a slow, rhythmic fever, a beautiful disease that refuses to be cured by any medicine found in a pharmacy. They sit there, heavy and expectant, waiting for a passerby to stop, to hold their trembling hands, and to examine the strange pulse of a living thing. Because every poem is … Continue reading The Guest Who Forgot to Leave

I carry this affection like a too-large clock ticking inside a small room, an urgency that rattles the windows and keeps the neighbors awake. It is a heavy, hurried thing, this love of mine. And yet, when I sit to trap it in a melody for you, the ink turns shy. I look at the staff and the scales, and I realize I cannot compose a single note that wouldn’t make the nightingale tilt its head in pity. My verses are merely sparrows hopping on a cold sidewalk, while your grace demands a sky I do not own. It is … Continue reading The Nightingale’s Pardon

“Me dê noticia de você, eu gosto um pouco de chorar, a gente quase não se vê, me deu vontade de lembrar. Me leve um pouco com você, eu gosto de qualquer lugar, a gente pode se entender e não saber o que falar. Seria um acontecimento, mas lógico que você some, no dia em que o seu pensamento me chamou; eu chamo o seu apartamento, não mora ninguém com esse nome, que linda a cantiga do vento; já passou. A gente quase não se vê, eu só queria me lembrar, me dê noticia de você, me deu vontade de … Continue reading Buarque-se!

Hurry—though to hurry is to betray the secret pulse of the moment. Run, then, until your breath becomes a rough, textured thing, a reminder that you are tragically, magnificently alive. Go to the window, or better yet, to the raw edge of the world, and look at the sky. It is not just a sky; it is an unbearable vastness that swallows our small, domestic certainties. And there, the sun. It does not merely rise; it arrives with the violence of a quiet revelation. It has come to bring a “Good morning,” but it is a greeting that tastes of … Continue reading Good morning!

Às vezes, o vento sopra com uma fúria que não é do ar, mas de dentro. É um vento que desarruma os pensamentos e desfolha o que julgávamos ser certezas. As noites, então, deixam de ser apenas ausência de sol para se tornarem um poço, uma escuridão espessa, quase tátil, que nos olha de volta. E o tempo… Ah, o tempo. Esse bicho estranho. Há dias em que os ponteiros do relógio não giram, eles se arrastam como se carregassem o peso do mundo inteiro. É nesse vagar que a gente nota. A gente nota o silêncio que sobrou entre … Continue reading O Sopro que resta

He holds my poems in his hands like artifacts, delicate yet distant, as if the words might crumble beneath his fingertips. He says he wants to read them, but when I tell him there is more—so much more—he does not ask to hear it. He does not ask to see the words still trembling within me. I want to unfold the letters I have hidden, to show him the ink that dared to be braver than I ever was. My notebooks know the weight of my heart better than I do; they are homes for confessions I have never spoken … Continue reading He Doesn’t Know

I have counted stars as if they were coins for a debt I never owed. I have romanced Error, feeling its cold breath against my neck, and I have been married, which is its own kind of star-counting. I have been drowned in too much wine and parched by too little, always thirsty for a liquid that does not exist. Once, I fell into another country. It was ugly. A physical rejection of the earth. I have been a merchant of the impossible: I sold ice to Eskimos and, eventually, I sold my soul. But then, in a fit of … Continue reading The Imprecise Inventory of a Soul

São dias de um silêncio denso, quase mineral. Eu, que não possuo o hábito de crer e a quem a oração não visita os lábios, sinto o peso da existência sem o apoio de um cajado invisível. Resta-me apenas a Pietas. Não como conceito, mas como essa compaixão crua, esse fio de seda que nos amarra uns aos outros no escuro. Às vezes me pergunto, e o pensar é um risco, se não seria mais repousante entregar-me a uma fé já pronta. Uma dessas crenças que se veste como uma roupa feita sob medida, costurada por séculos de tradição, onde … Continue reading O Santuário de Carne