POETRY

-       from O livro de desassossego, ‘Selected Poems – Fernando Pessoa’, trans. David Butler, The Dedalus Press, Dublin, 2009

Everything that man explains or expresses is a note in the margin of a text that has been entirely erased. More or less, from the sense of the note, we hit upon the sense that the text must have had; but there always remains a doubt, and the possible senses are numerous.

NEUROWARD2EAST

For Andrea

You went back or forward or simply out

past a self’s meniscus,

you have been where we have not.

What do you bring back? What

alien mark, tooled

by death’s tenderness for you?

For days you stayed only as breath,

the leanest part, just inside our world,

a bonily pointing at hearts bracing

to be yours.

The rest of what you are, or were

shuttered behind unanswerable doors,

pawed only by the precise saw

of the surgeon, whose hands inside

juggled the entrails of all memories.

Made master by mortal duels

he fretted your life for hours,

a newborn thing, which nearly leapt,

to break the thinnest rope

by which you spanned your spaces.

I sensed you watch everything

from behind in there, as

from the corner of a distant star,

counting, across your (still) human palms

that which you adored,

that which you would leave behind.

A terrible shuffling of shortened straws.

Insucked as you were, a doll

grey with jammed recall, days

interleaving wrongly with other days,

our calendar useless: each today

become the yesterday

when your brilliant blood flooded your skull

c. Jacinta Le Plastrier 2012