Salgado Maranhão,
translated from the Portugese by Alexis Levitin
BOUNDARY 6
( Thaw)
Recording the remote contours of your flesh
I discover pictorial
allusions
--not to Renoir--
but to Modigliani
and his females
with their long stretched stems.
Texture imprinted
en ton sur ton
the lines of movement
--in allegro moderato–
delineate your moistened fruit.
(And glistening in the hidden triangle
a design, exposed,
of the piercing
in your clitoris.)
The shapes between
the lines of your abyss are ripe,
in the deep grooves that thaw
your wealth of waters.
VIA CRUCIS
Waves of sound
weave
the script
of the streets
(unrelenting fire
feline ferocity).
Crashing waves of sound
collapse
among sanctuaries
of stone
and sounds of
solitary
anonymity . .
They prowl about
--bipeds
and their vehicles--
in the drive-in
this, our via crucis.
OF THINGS
Things, orphans of light,
attack our little tithe
of sky—blue light.
Alive, they writhe
--lava of wandering shades--
buzzing through human glades,
a landscape of our kind,
reflecting the assembly line
of our desires. (Or is it shimmering
forth the very force of glimmering
things themselves?) Junk that seals our eyelids shut
our lives, department stores, that glut
of endless goods. Could there be another way
for those within the web to flay
the plumb-line, dare to fray
the fabric of our daily deadly day?
YANOMANI
For: Sapain and
Américo Peret
When the children of menstruation
come
with gunpowder tongues,
when the barbarous hordes
come,
call Tupã
call Xamã
When the bloody light comes,
the homicidal gods
with their thirst for stone?
Call Tupã
Call Xamã
When the sacred places
are disturbed the night will come!
It will come like the breath of morning
for I will be growing
weak;
The night will come like the wind
for I will be dying:
when the river will underscore
in the bitter earth
its legend of blood.
Oh wind that aligns our destiny!
Oh rite that speaks to our ancestors!
Call Tupã
Call Xamã.
DEEPEST BLACK
I am gnawed away in flesh
not in a symbol
made of stone
and Pegasus.
Scaffolds rise
from me
beneath a dream
fever
that from memory
radiates resplendent
to the bones
and corpuscles.
I’m on the razor edge
and what spreads
to my veins
and their fleeting gold
suffices.
My rite floods
through my lymph.
(Even if from the brutish
saga
they are stamping out
the stigma of
cruel tanned
skins.)
In pain
the real
descends
to the bone
raw
and splintered
like the inside
gazing at it
self.
Hours
in sepia
defeat the circling
of promise
so that from the excess
--essence.
And not even the tender
being
of water
in modules
changes
the pain that pains
the blood
the pain
of the impalpable.
The magma of the race
hostile
to the marshy shack
erupts
from the brute
yoke:
lava of primeval
sun
renga of the tribal
drum
cateretê
babá.
Ardent in trance
and the (endless)
wait
desperate
in a reptile rap
the tin can
yap
I reign
on the surface of my flesh
of deepest black
where they deny me.
ZENARM
For João Manuel Lima Mira
In Musachi’s painting the bush suspends the bird’s flight.
Vivid in their frame (bush and bird), they stay static in
permanent impermanence. (As in the rite of zen fencing the
flight of the hand on the hilt envelops blade and samurai.)
Death. Time. Life and The Way merge in the stroke.
Agile beyond action.
SYNERGY
For Sebastião Uchoa Leite
Ascetic script (almost without words)
seeking synergy with its sign
(The dribble dances on the edge
the perfect base-line goal ).
Citric script, exact:
golden mascara on a blank sheet.
Placed precise on paper, words
(without bravado) speak
a diamond’s brilliance without the stone
EXECUTION
Projectiles pulse like drops
of innocent light,
in the body now deserted,
uninhabited,
unfit for use.
Ideograms of blood-flowers
sewing, sewing torn
tissues.
On the naked
fractured keel
night mist envelops nothingness.
WET-NURSE BUTCHER SHOP
“I danced in the slaughterhouse, as if the blood of
all the animals hanging around me disemboweled
were my own.” --Luiz Miguel Nava
I accompany the cattle hanging from their hooks.
I accompany red solitude (in bits) behind he
window pane. The bellow that (still!) splatters on
smooth stone. And the ghost of angels tattooed with
cruelty. Gluttony in transit spreads before the murmur
of the workshop of nourishing blood. That blood that
never calls forth our pity (or the instant in which the
knife sublimates our coyote half), redolent in us with
fibers of intrepid putrefaction. As if within our inner
core the butcher shop were standing naked stripping out
the ducts through which our sanctity comes gushing forth.