The year is 1990, and I am standing in a field in Glencoe, Minnesota. The horizon is wide here; the trees that rush from the east to greet the Mighty Mississippi seem hesitant to venture far from her safe waters, into the wide, wide prairies, and huddle here and there around farmsteads, brought two or three generations ago by the sodbusters who begged shelter from the merciless Alberta winds, even partially, even for a moment, that sped unimpeded from the Rockies to the Great Lakes.

The internal horizon is wide as well. Year one into a one-year career as an organic farmer, I have brought my bottomless hunger for learning to a brand-new organic farm, contributing equal parts (and quantities) energy and ignorance to our project. I am sure I was a benefit and a curse. Sixteen-hour days made my body stronger than it had ever been, and my mind possibly weaker, as I rose before dawn and collapsed soon after dark. Year one into a fifteen-year adventure with the mother of my children, my super-intelligent and active/activist partner from the south of Brasil. Our paths ran together like water, later parted like a tide. There you are: a life.

On those 100 tractor-packed acres of southwest Minnesota till we planted 7 with organic vegetables, mostly manually cultivated. That’s another story; or maybe it is the same as this one: the narratives run together in a flow of colors and emotions that, running downhill as we all do, magically arrive to the present, echoes like diminishing waves that retain their shape despite the distance, completely recognizable in the form they first arrived, crashing breakers or subtle rounds; we are made up of waves, so one chord or frequency, touched, plays that tone in us, where a song or a phrase, heard at a span of twenty-five years, whirls you back and forward in time, time as energy, connects this today and that today, makes one of it all.

~

I am standing right now in that field, the two doors of my old Subaru open and the back hatch up, stacked with vegetable boxes. It is late August in that part of the world, which spells heat, and enough rain to ripen an acre of tomatoes, wilt rows of greens (never intended for these temperatures), and make jungles of the irrepressible summer squashes. I am harvesting for our subscriptions – we are a community-supported farm – and for the organic markets. The demands of the two are dramatically different, one cooperative and grateful, the other disinterested unless we have a consistency and volume which runs completely contrary to the climate and season of the living world.

What makes the leaden effort light is the learning, is our new love, and the music that trails from the car-door speakers. That’s why the doors are open. They are doors to another world. The voices sing in Brazilian Portuguese, that I know and don’t know: all these things are destined to lift me up, bodily, and carry me south of the equator, where I will land in a lush, humid, warmly jostling life that has probably been within me all this time, to be freed when it sees itself.

My future sister-in-law had sent a tape north to matar saudades – to remove the inevitable longing for home felt by any transplanted life. I had it playing in a loop all summer long, until the digital spots were worn off the medium. I found the music in the country and culture itself, but once I arrived was unable to discover the exact recording that I had been listening to for months. I suppose I became distracted, or sated.

Several days before taking a similar wave, this time east to Barcelona, I was sifting through online albums and resources, and found Clube da Esquina 2… the second disk set of an album I thought was my elusive summer soundtrack. What?! I thought the tape had been a compilation, whose most-loved tracks were out of print and scattered in attics and boxes of vinyl and memory.

There was so much love bound up in that music. Maybe in a poem or in a song I could describe what I experienced, discovering this recording existed: I opened a link with a list of tracks, and began reading, and a chill ran up my spine to my head, something akin to a roman candle, which fired once it reached its height, sending a tingling shower of stars down over my shoulders, warming my heart, washing my belly, sparking my sex, bouncing my legs, tapping my toes, and rooting the soles of my feet.

I guess that’s your poem, yours unedited as it arrived to my fingers.

And here is Milton’s music, a (personally prescient? future-creating?) poem by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, written in a golden age of poetics in Brazil. It sent roots and runners through the waters of the Gulf, to the delta of our great American Amazon, against its gravity-bound current and all probability to the headwaters in my home state, somehow reaching the flowers and fruits of that summer in the sun.

Canção Amiga

Eu preparo uma canção
Em que minha mãe se reconheça
Todas as mães se reconheçam
E que fale como dois olhos

Caminho por uma rua
Que passa em muitos países
Se não me vêem, eu vejo
E saúdo velhos amigos

Eu distribuo um segredo
Como quem ama ou sorri
No jeito mais natural
Dois carinhos se procuram

Minha vida, nossas vidas
Formam um só diamante
Aprendi novas palavras
E tornei outras mais belas

Eu preparo uma canção
Que faça acordar os homens
E adormecer as crianças

Eu preparo uma canção
Que faça acordar os homens
E adormecer as crianças

Canção Amiga – Milton Nascimento

Song of Friendship

I am composing a song
that my mother see herself
that all mothers can see themselves
that speaks like two eyes

I pass along a road
That winds through many countries;
If they don’t see me, I see them
Welcome them as old friends

I am sharing a secret
Like one who loves or smiles
In the most natural way
Two caresses seek each other

My life, our lives
Form a single diamond.
I learned new words
and made others more beautiful

I am composing a song
That it awaken the people
And sing the children to sleep

tr. Mark Schultz

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