by Adélia Prado
a charmed flute,
an oboe in Bach.
Yellow engenders.
Purple
Purple puts on the squeeze.
Purple is tart and narrow.
Tyrant purple goes straight for the heart,
crazy for dawn.
Jesus’s passion is purple and white,
very close to joy.
Purple is tart; it will ripen.
Purple is handsome and I like him.
Yellow likes him.
The sky purples morning and evening,
a red rose growing older.
I gallop after purple,
a sad memory, a four o’clock flower.
I round up love to turn me purple with passion,
I who choose and am chosen.
Seductive Sadness Winks at Me
I’m looking for the saddest thing, which once found
will never be lost again, because it will follow me
more loyal than a dog, the ghost
of a dog, sadness beyond words.
I have three choices: the first, a man,
still alive, calls me to his bedside
and says in his softest voice: ‘Pray for me to sleep, will you?’
Or, I dream I’m beating a little boy. I beat him and beat him
until my arm is decomposing and he’s black and blue. I beat him some more
and he laughs, without anger, he laughs at me who beats him.
In the last (and I personally create this horror),
the siren shrieks, calling a man who’s already dead, and keeps
shrieking through the night till dawn and he doesn’t return
and the siren insists and her voice is human.
If that’s not enough, try this:
I lift my son by his sensitive organs
and he kisses me on the face.
Window
A pretty word, window.
Window: the wingbeat of the yellow butterfly.
Two carelessly painted wooden shutters open out,
clumsy blue window.
I jump in and out of you, ride you like a horse,
my foot dragging the ground.
Window on the open world, from where I saw
Anita, expecting, get married, Pedro Cisterna’s
mother urinating in the rain, from where I saw
my love arrive on a bicycle and say to my father:
I have only the best intentions regarding your daughter.
O wooden-latched window, child’s play for thieves,
peephole on my soul,
I look into my heart.
Heart’s Desire
I’m no matron, mother of warriors, Cornelia,
but a woman of the people, mother of children, Adélia.
I cook and I eat.
Sundays I bang the bone on the plate to call the dog
and toss out the scraps.
When it hurts, I yell ouch,
when it’s good, I’m brutish,
impulses beyond control.
But I have my crying spells,
little clarities behind my humble stomach,
and a booming voice for hymn singing.
When I write the book bearing my name
and the name I will give it, I’ll bring it to a church,
to a tombstone, to the wilderness,
to cry and cry and cry,
elegant and odd as a lady.
The Girl with the Sensitive Nose
Don’t wanna eat, Mama
(big enamel kettle on a corner of the stove)
don’t wanna eat, Mama
(rice and beans, thick macaroni)
don’t wanna eat, Mama
(no tomato sauce)
don’t wanna eat, Mama
(tastes like sawdust)
don’t wanna eat, Mama
(that smell of acetylene gas)
don’t wanna eat, Mama
(saw a cat on the way home, teeming with fleas)
don’t wanna eat, Mama
(when we get electric lights and Dad
gives up on the gas lantern, that’s when I’ll eat).
Let’s leave it dark, Mama. Use the kerosene lamp,
not the gas please – the blue part smells,
it seeps into your skin, in the food, in your thoughts,
takes the shapes of things. It’s like when you get mad, Mama,
so mad you can’t yell, that’s how bad the gas is,
the blue part. I’m gonna throw up, Mama. Don’t wanna eat now.
I’ll wait for the electricity.
Seduction
Poetry catches me with her toothed wheel
and forces me to listen, stock-still,
to her extravagant discourse.
Poetry embraces me behind the garden wall, she picks up
her skirt and lets me see, loving and loony.
Bad things happen, I tell her,
I, too, am a child of God,
allow me my despair.
Her answer is to draw her hot tongue
across my neck;
she says rod to calm me,
she says stone, geometry,
she gets careless and turns tender,
I take advantage and sneak off.
I run and she runs faster,
I yell and she yells louder,
seven demons stronger.
She catches me, making deep grooves
from tip to toe.
Poetry’s toothed wheel is made of steel.
At Customs
All I could offer, unblemished, were
my tears in response to beauty or fatigue,
a tooth dangling roots,
my bias in favor of everything baroque
in music, and Rio de Janeiro,
which, when I visited once, took my breath away.
‘Not good enough,’ they said. And demanded
the foreign language I hadn’t learned,
the record of my misplaced diploma
in the Ministry of Education, plus a tax on vanity
in all its forms – obvious, unusual, or insidious,
and why not? – although their ways
of detecting vanity were unusual and insidious.
Every time I apologised they said:
‘You’re acting polite and humble out of pride,’
and piled on the duties, and the ship left
while we were wrangling.
Then, as I grabbed my tooth and my trip to Rio,
ready to weep with fatigue, came the last straw:
‘The roots stay here, as security.’
There went my tooth.
Now I have just three unblemished items for collateral.
Easter
Age
is a way of feeling cold that takes me by surprise
and a certain acidity.
The way a dog curls up
when the lights go out and people go to bed.
I divide my day into three parts:
the first to look at photographs,
the second to look in mirrors,
the third, and longest, to cry.
Once blonde and lyrical,
I am not picturesque.
I ask God
on behalf of my weakness,
to abbreviate my days and grant me the face
of an aging, tired mother, a good grandmama,
I don’t care which. That’s what I aspire to
in my impatience and pain.
Because there’s always someone
smack dab in the middle of my happiness saying:
‘Don’t forget your overcoat.’
‘You wouldn’t have the nerve!’
‘Why aren’t you wearing your glasses?’
Even a dried rosebud with its powdery perfume –
I want something sweet like that,
something which says: that’s her.
So I won’t be afraid of posing for a picture,
so I’ll be
handed a poem on parchment.
Love Song
First came cancer of the liver, then came the man
leaping from bed to floor and crawling around
on all fours, shouting: ‘Leave me alone, all of you,
just leave me be’, such was his pain without remission.
Then came death and, in that zero hour, the shirt missing a button.
I’ll sew it on, I promise,
but wait, let me cry first.
‘Ah,’ said Martha and Mary, ‘if You had been here,
our brother would not have died.’ ‘Wait,’ said Jesus,
‘let me cry first.’
So it’s okay to cry? I can cry too?
If they asked me now about life’s joy,
I would have only the memory of a tiny flower.
Or maybe more, I’m very sad today:
what I say, I unsay. But God’s Word
is the truth. That’s why this song has the name it has.
Serenade
Some night under a pale moon and geraniums
he would come with his incredible hands and mouth
to play the flute in the garden.
I am beginning to despair
and can see only two choices:
either go crazy or turn holy.
I, who reject and reprove
anything that’s not natural as blood and veins,
discover that I cry daily,
my hair saddened, strand by strand,
my skin attacked by indecision.
When he comes, for it’s clear that he’s coming,
how will I go out onto the balcony without my youth?
He and the moon and the geraniums will be the same –
only women of all things grow old.
How will I open the window, unless I’m crazy?
How will I close it, unless I’m holy?
FROM
The Headlong Heart
(1981)
Concerted Effort
The flatiron was invented
because of Eternal Life.
Or else why bother to crease trousers
if every ending is worm-eaten wood,
bones so clean there’s no need for nausea?
Which is also why
metaphysicians hatch soliloquies,
good governments govern with justice,
and I’m wearing a low-cut dress.
My desire for the handsome young man
lives on,
it’s written on my fingernails,
and grows with their roots.
Can a woman have twenty orgasms?
I don’t worry about such silly details.
I want love, superior love.
I can tolerate only seven sorrows.
One more, and I go numb, playing my guitar.
Cemeteries are holy ground, that’s why they attract me
after I get over being repelled.
Even if people insist: Look, there where your father was –
a splinter of rotting wood,
ribbons of cloth and dust.
He’s crossed over, I say,
this silence is a trick, sheer expectation,
it’s exactly what hope is when it doesn’t rattle.
I know all about the burial, the lapse, the autopsy,
I realise there are drowning victims, chopping blocks, forged signatures.
But why do you think pendulums swing?
After the grave, the clock goes on ticking,
someone makes coffee, everybody drinks it.
The boy went blind, his mother went crazy the day after,
silly the second,
and by the third was on the front porch leafing through a fashion magazine
because she wants a cool dress
to scare off the heat.
I had intended to whine, to throw up my arms, tempted
to sin against the Holy Spirit.
But life won’t let me. And what I say
ends up brimming with joy.
Not Even One Line in December
I never want to desire death
unless out of holiness,
calling it sister, as Saint Francis did.
Almost the twenty-fifth and not one line.
My hips moving back and forth
and me not trying to contain the wiggle –
I should have walked like this my whole life
if I wanted to conquer the world.
Dusky butterflies, trash, pebbles,
soapy water seeping from the wall,
things offer themselves up to me
as I roam the neighbourhood.
A little girl watches from her tiled porch,
and not even a line.
My work is important because it’s all I have.
In a three-bedroom house with a tired back yard
the soul keeps moaning ah, life….
The idea of suicide appears
and floats past the TV antenna,
but it keeps coming back, and not even a line.
I need to confess to a man of God:
I committed gluttony, I craved
the details of other people’s frailties,
and – even though I have a husband –
I explored my own body.
Not even one line in December, and I was born for this!
My soul longs to copulate!
The Wise Men rush past me, the star is in hiding,
it’s raining torrents in Brazil.
Day
The chickens open their beaks in alarm
and stop, with that knack they have,
immobile – I was going to say immoral –
wattles and coxcombs stark red,
only the arteries quivering in their necks.
A woman startled by sex,
but delighted.
A Man Inhabited a House
Death’s charm, its disastrous spell,
is due to life,
because heaven is to the west of my father’s house
where reside all the riches of the world and my soul.
There’s a corner of the room
where I go to eat secretly, plate in hand,
from whence I see Jerusalem, its sparkling domes,
the Rose of Jericho in bloom.
From that perspective,
grave diseases look tame,
my cousin and her five bastard children, innocent.
Gunshots, alcohol, carelessness, even fear
settle in a cup of tea and sink to the bottom
thick with compassion and sugar,
indefatigable patience.
The bruised medicinal herbs add an aroma to the holiness
of the struggle to repeat: Oh, God, yes,
yes, my body is weak,
yes, I miss my bicycle,
the way I would dash off into the street flaunting
my invincible dominion over gullies and stones,
yes, youth affects me this much,
yes, and my weariness which is nothing at all
compared to what You suffered for me, oh, Father, on the cross.
Does the body feel pain?
This is what I ate:
plain rice, beans, and raw onion,
but the plate had a painted border.
The spoon was tarnishing,
but there were forget-me-nots engraved on the handle.
The body experiences joy, the tongue eats it:
bright, hot, unquestionable as suns.
Do we die?
I understand mathematics better.
Lineage
My gynaecological tree
passed down noble,
marbleised gestures:
my father, on his wedding day,
left my mother behind and went to a dance.
She had only one dress, but what bearing,
what legs! What silk stockings she deserved!
My paternal grandfather sold green tomatoes;
it didn’t work out. He demolished whole jungles
for charcoal, pores black with ashes to the end of his life:
‘Don’t bury me in Jaguara, no, not in Jaguara’,
My maternal grandfather had a small grocery,
a kidney stone, suffered excessively
from bellyaches and the cold,
and hoarded cheese and coins in his wooden strongbox.
None of them ever thought of writing a book.
Extreme sinners, one and all, penitent
until the public confession of sins,
which one proclaimed as if for all:
‘All men go astray. It doesn’t do any good
to say not me. All men go astray.
Anyone who hasn’t is about to.’
There’s no way to improve this maxim,
it’s so tied up with their tears
the moment they were shed,
and it remained, intact, until I –
whose mother and grandmothers died young,
in childbirth – without comment
passed it on to my heirs,
overwhelmed
by a pain so high,
so deep,
a pain so beautiful,
in the midst of green tomatoes and charcoal,
mouldy cheese and bellyaches.
A Good Cause
The President is dying.
I cry, wanting my tears to be the most definitive of all,
and I cry for this very vanity.
Poets before me have cried, and better, and more beautifully,
and more deeply, and not just for the death of the king,
but for mine, yours, their own,
for the miserable condition of being human. Nevertheless,
the reasons to cry have not been exhausted.
My power is small, I govern a few memories:
a plate, a tablecloth, one Sunday,
the sweet smell of orange peel.
Good and Evil escape me, even though and because they inhabit me.
Day escapes me, the hour, all the hours;
