The world spins and we spin with it. Years ago I was born near here; a year later I moved to there; then there, then there, then there. I changed cities, I changed countries, I changed continents; I walked as far as I could, and took a train when the road stretched too long; I boarded a plane when I ran out of rail; I ended up here.

I each of those places I called my home, I had the fortune to arrive after strife and depart before strife, at least as my heart measured it: others might have called my smallest journey struggle, and certainly the act of getting to know a new culture, and you yourself in relationship to it, is not for the faint of heart. Still, it becomes an art. (As Elizabeth Bishop famously, sadly wrote: The art of losing isn’t hard to master…“).

In that mastery, between one here and the next, you take a breath.

THE EMIGRANT PAUSES ON THE HILL OF MIRRORS

Love
my last my greatest companion
this heaviness will pass…
just a salt wind from the ocean
stale air before the storm
that seems will never break
will break

it is slow, I grant you
but you must believe in weather
and we live in Brazil
where five minutes changes darkness to rain
and rain to bullets for that matter
which evaporate into the sky
or evaporate as quickly as coins
wouldn’t you agree?

it all passes, even joy
has its season of flowers
its Carnaval dress
then cold of the vespers

but if you believe in weather
then we live on a spinning top
and if you have watched night rush the day
like a woman shaking a black bedcloth
over the river in the morning
as the hairs that love teased out
wash away to the Guaíba
well
take a deep breath, love

we live in Brazil
where despair and hope are the children
you can’t tell apart
who cry with one voice
don’t stay in the doorway calling for me
I will be lost
until I am not lost
that is a kind of weather
that heaviness, I say, will pass
there are a thousand laborers carrying it off
to fill holes in the highway
labor is cheap as water here
and traffic is smuggled by miraculously
even joy passes on that highway
you say is bound for somewhere else

we live in Brazil
and they always come back
from wherever they’ve gone, or believe they will
just as the dictator’s picture is never thrown away
but saved for next year, unfortunately
and returned to the mantle with a sigh
which sounds a little like thunder
from a great distance
coming over
the desert

Porto Alegre, Nov 1991

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2014