the emigrant pauses on the hill of mirrors
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
