To the East which is everything we don’t have,
Which is everything we’re not,
To the East where—who knows?—perhaps Christ still lives,
Where perhaps God really exists and rules over all . . .
Come over the seas,
Over the widest seas,
Over the seas without definite horizons,
Come and pass your hand over the back of that wild, watery
beast,
Mysteriously calming it,
O hypnotic tamer of greatly agitated things!
Come, ever considerate,
Come, ever maternal,
Come on tiptoe, ancient nurse who sat
At the bedside of the gods of lost religions
And witnessed the birth of Jehovah and Jupiter
And smiled because for you all is false and useless.
Come, silent and ecstatic Night,
Come wrap your white mantle
Around my heart,
Serenely like a breeze on a balmy afternoon,
Gently like a mother’s soothing gesture,
With the stars shimmering in your hands
And the moon a mysterious mask on your face.
All sounds sound different
When you come.
All voices hush when you enter.
No one sees you enter.
No one knows when you have entered
Except of a sudden, when everything starts to withdraw,
When everything loses its edges and colors,
And high above, in the still bluish sky,
As a distinct crescent, a white circle, or just a sliver of
new light,
The moon begins to be real.
II
Ah the twilight, nightfall, the lights turning on in big cities,
And the hand of mystery that stills the hubbub,
And the weariness weighing on everything in us, hindering
An active and accurate feeling of Life!
Each street is a canal in a Venice of tediums,
And how mysterious the unanimous end of the streets
When the night falls, O my master Cesário Verde,
Who wrote “Sentiment of a Westerner”!
What profound restlessness, what longing for other things
That aren’t countries or moments or lives!
What longing for perhaps other kinds of moods
Inwardly moistens this lingering, remote instant!
A horror that sleepwalks among the city’s first lights,
A mild and fluid terror that leans against street corners
Like a beggar waiting for impossible sensations
Without knowing who might bestow them . . .
When I die,
When I go away—ingloriously, like everyone—
Down that road whose very idea we can’t face directly,
Through that door we’d never take if we could choose,
Toward that port that’s unknown to the captain of the Ship,
Let it be at this hour of day, worthy of all the tedium I’ve
suffered,
This ancient and spiritual and mystical hour,
This hour in which perhaps, much longer ago than it seems,
Plato, dreaming, saw the idea of God
Shaping body and existence as something perfectly plausible
In his thoughts externalized like a field.
Let it be at this hour that you take me off to be buried,
At this hour when I don’t know how to live,
When I don’t know what to feel or pretend I feel,
At this hour whose mercy is tortured and excessive,
Whose shadows come from something other than things,
Whose passing drags no robes over the ground of
Sensible Life
Nor leaves any fragrance on the paths of Sight.
Cross your hands on your knee, O consort I don’t have or
wish to have,
Cross your hands on your knee and look at me in silence
At this hour when I can’t see that you’re looking at me,
Look at me in silence and in secret, and ask yourself
—You who know me—who I am . . .
30 JUNE 1914
MARITIME ODE
Alone this summer morning on the deserted wharf,
I look toward the bar, I look toward the Indefinite,
I look and am glad to see
The tiny black figure of an incoming steamer.
It’s still far away but distinct, classic in its own way.
It leaves a useless trail of smoke in the air far behind it.
It’s coming in, and the morning with it, and here and there
Along the river maritime life begins to stir:
Sails are hoisted, tugboats advance,
Small boats jut out from behind the anchored ships.
There’s a slight breeze.
But my soul is with what I least see,
The incoming steamer,
Because it’s with the Distance, with Morning,
With the maritime meaning of this Hour,
With the sweet pain that rises in me like a queasiness,
Like the onset of seasickness, but in my soul.
I look at the far-off steamer with great independence
of mind,
And in me a flywheel slowly starts spinning.
The steamers coming in around the bar in the morning
Bring to my eyes
The happy and sad mystery of all who arrive and depart.
They bring memories of distant wharfs and other moments
Of another sort of the same humanity in other ports.
Every landing and every sailing of a ship
Is—I feel it in me like my own blood—
Unconsciously symbolic, terribly
Fraught with metaphysical meanings
That stir up in me the man I once was . . .
Ah, every wharf is a nostalgia made of stone!
And when the ship shoves off
And we suddenly notice a space widening
Between the wharf and the ship,
Then I’m hit by a fresh anxiety I can’t explain,
A mist of sad feelings
Glistening in the sun of my grassy anxieties
Like the first dawn-lit window,
And it wraps me as if it were someone else’s remembrance
Now mysteriously mine.
Ah, who knows, who knows
If I didn’t already set sail from a wharf
A long time ago, before I ever was—if I, a ship
In the slanting light of dawn,
Didn’t already depart from another kind of port?
Who knows if, long before the outer world as I know it
Dawned for me,
I didn’t already depart
From a large wharf full of a few people,
From a large, half-awakened city,
From a huge, commercial, overgrown and apoplectic city,
As far as this is possible outside of Space and Time?
Yes, from a wharf, a wharf in some sense material,
Real, with the form of a wharf, a wharf in fact,
The Absolute Wharf whose model we’ve unconsciously
imitated,
Unwittingly evoked, to build
Our wharfs that serve our ports,
Our wharfs of literal stone over actual water,
And once they’re built they strike us without warning as
Real Things, Spirit Things, Soul-Stone Beings,
At certain moments of root feeling
When a door in the outer world seems to open
And, without anything changing,
Everything proves to be different.
Ah the Great Wharf from where we set sail in Nation-Ships!
O Great Primordial Wharf, eternal and divine!
Of what port? Over what waters? And why do I wonder?
Great Wharf like other wharfs, but the only One.
Rustling, like them, with predawn silences
And blossoming with morning to the noise of cranes
And arriving freight trains,
Under an occasional, thin black cloud
Of smoke from nearby factories
That shades the black and shiny, coal-sprinkled ground
Like the shadow of a cloud passing over dusky waters . . .
Ah, what essence of mystery and senses arrested
In revelatory divine ecstasy
At hours colored by silence and anxieties
Forms the bridge between any wharf and The Wharf!
Wharf blackly reflected in still waters,
The bustle on board ships,
O wandering, restless soul of people who live in ships,
Of symbolic people who come and go, and for whom
nothing lasts,
For when the ship returns to port
There’s always some change on board!
O never-ending flights, departures, drunkenness from
Diversity!
Eternal soul of navigators and navigations!
Hulls slowly mirrored in the water
As the ship pulls out of port!
To float like life’s soul, to sally forth like a voice,
To live the moment gently tossing on eternal waters,
To wake up to days more immediate than Europe’s,
To see mysterious ports bordering the sea’s solitude,
To round far-off capes and find sudden vast landscapes
Of countless startled slopes . . .
Ah, the distant beaches, the wharfs seen from afar,
And then the beaches close up, the wharfs in plain view.
The mystery of every departure and every arrival,
The sad instability and inscrutability
Of this impossible universe
Felt more deeply in the skin with each passing maritime
hour!
Our souls’ absurd sobbing
Over the expanses of diverse seas with isles in the distance,
Over the distant islands flanking the coasts not visited,
Over the ports that grow clearer with their houses and people
As the ship approaches.
Ah, how fresh the mornings of arrivals are,
And how pallid the mornings of departures,
When our insides tighten into a ball
And a vague sensation akin to fear
—The ancestral fear of leaving what we know and going away,
The mysterious ancestral fear of Arrival and the New—
Makes us shrink in our skin with anxiety.
And the whole of our anguished body, as if it were our soul,
Feels an inexplicable desire to feel all this
In some other way.
There’s a nostalgia for something,
A stirring of affection, but for what uncertain country?
What coast? What ship? What wharf?
The thought languishes,
And we’re left with a large inner void,
A hollow satiety of seaborne minutes,
And a vague anxiety that would be weariness or sorrow
If it knew how to be either . . .
Even so, the summer morning is slightly cool.
A slight torpor of night still wafts in the shaken air.
The flywheel in me spins a bit faster.
And the steamer is coming in, because I know it must be
coming
And not because I can see it moving at such a great distance.
In my imagination it’s already close by and visible
All up and down its rows of portholes,
And everything in me trembles, all my muscles and flesh,
Because of that person who never arrives in any boat
And whom I’ve come to wait for today, because of an
oblique command.
The ships coming in around the bar,
The ships setting out from ports,
The ships passing in the offing
(I imagine myself watching them from a deserted beach),
All these abstract ships about to depart—
All these ships move me as if they were more
Than mere ships, ships coming and going.
And ships seen from up close, even if we’re not going to
embark on them,
Seen from below, from the skiffs, next to the steel
broadsides,
Seen from inside, in the cabins, the lounges, the storerooms,
Seeing up close the masts tapering high overhead,
Brushing against the ropes, descending the cramped
stairways,
Smelling the greasy metallic and maritime mixture of all
this—
Ships seen from up close are something else and are the
same,
Stirring the same nostalgia and the same yearning in
another way.
The seafaring life! All that it embraces and all that it is!
All of its sweet seduction filters into my blood,
And I daydream indefinitely of voyages.
The distant coastlines, flattened by the horizon!
The capes, islands, and sandy beaches!
The maritime solitudes, like certain moments in the Pacific
When by the power of some suggestion learned in school
Our nerves feel the weight of its being the largest ocean,
And the world and the taste of things become a desert in us!
The splashier, more human expanse of the Atlantic!
The Indian Ocean, the most mysterious of all!
And the Mediterranean, without mystery, soft and classical,
a sea that washes
Esplanades eyed by white statues in nearby gardens!
How I’d love to hold all seas, all straits, all bays and all gulfs
Against my chest, feel them close, and die!
And you, O nautical things, my old dream toys!
Be my inner life, outside me!
Keels, masts and sails, helms, rigging,
Smokestacks, propellers, topsails, pennants,
Tiller ropes, hatchways, boilers, pipes and valves,
Fall inside of me in a heap, one big heap,
Like the jumbled contents of a drawer dumped out on the
floor!
Be the treasure of my feverish greed,
Be the fruit of the tree of my imagination,
Theme of my songs, blood in the veins of my intellect,
The aesthetic link between me and the outside!
Provide me with metaphors, images, literature,
Because really and truly, seriously, literally,
My sensations are a boat with its keel in the air,
My imagination a half-sunken anchor,
My yearning a broken oar,
And the web of my nerves a net left to dry on the beach!
Somewhere on the river a single whistle blows.
The entire ground of my psyche is now trembling.
The flywheel in me keeps moving faster.
Ah, the steamers, the voyages, the not-knowing-the-
whereabouts
Of so-and-so, a seaman of our acquaintance!
Ah, the glory of knowing that a man who palled around
with us
Was drowned off an island in the Pacific!
We who knew him will tell this to everyone
With all due pride and a quiet conviction
That all this has a broader and more beautiful meaning
Than just the loss of the ship on which he sailed
And his sinking to the bottom with his lungs full of water!
Ah, the steamers, the coal ships, the sailing ships!
How rare, alas! sailing ships are becoming on the high seas!
I who love modern civilization and kiss machines with all
my soul,
I the engineer and sophisticate who studied abroad,
Would love to see once again only wooden ships and sailing
vessels,
To know no other seafaring life besides the ancient life of the
seas!
For the ancient seas are Absolute Distance,
The Pure Faraway, free of the weight of Today . . .
Ah, how everything here reminds me of that better life,
Of those seas that were larger, since navigation was slower,
Of those seas that were mysterious, since no one knew much
about them!
Every faraway steamer is a nearby sailing ship.
Every distant ship seen now is a ship from the past
seen up close.
All the invisible sailors aboard ships on the horizon
Are visible sailors from the time of the old vessels,
From the slow, sail-driven age of perilous voyages,
From the wood and canvas age of voyages that took months.
The delirium of maritime things slowly takes hold of me,
The wharf and its atmosphere physically penetrate me,
The surging of the Tagus inundates my senses,
And I begin to dream, to be wrapped by the dream of the
waters,
The transmission belts on my soul start turning hard,
And I’m visibly shaken by the flywheel’s increasing speed.
The waters call me,
The oceans call me,
The faraway calls me with a bodily voice,
And it’s every seafaring age there ever was, calling.
It was you, Jim Barnes, English sailor and my friend,
Who taught me that ancient English cry
Which so virulently sums up
For complex souls like mine
The confused call of the waters,
The uncanny, implicit voice of all maritime things,
Of shipwrecks, of long voyages, of dangerous crossings.
A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe Page 12
