A Large Number

Four billion people on this earth,
but my imagination is the way it's always been:
bad with large numbers.
It is still moved by particularity.
It flits about the darkness like a flashlight beam,
disclosing only random faces,
while the rest go blindly by,
unthought of, unpitied.
Not even a Dante could have stopped that.
So what do you do when you're not,
even with all the muses on your side?

Non omnis moriar—a premature worry.
Yet am I fully alive, and is that enough?
It never has been, and even less so now.
I select by rejecting, for there's no other way,
but what I reject, is more numerous,
more dense, more intrusive than ever.
At the cost of untold losses—a poem, a sigh.
I reply with a whisper to a thunderous calling.
How much I am silent about I can't say.
A mouse at the foot of mother mountain.
Life lasts as long as a few lines of claws in the sand.

My dreams—even they are not as populous as they should be.
There is more solitude in them than crowds or clamor.
Sometimes someone long dead will drop by for a bit.
A single hand turns a knob.
Annexes of echo overgrow the empty house.
I run from the threshold down into the quiet
valley seemingly no one's—an anachronism by now.

Where does all this space still in me come from—
that I don't know.

- Wislawa Szymborska

(adoro as tuas meias adoro as coxas as curvas os lábios o calor que emanas a flor o suor as formas o sabor e todas as cores com que falas)

When man
enters woman,
like the surf biting the shore,
again and again,
and the woman opens her mouth with pleasure
and her teeth gleam
like the alphabet,
Logos appears milking a star,
and the man
inside of woman
ties a knot
so that they will
never again be separate
and the woman
climbs into a flower
and swallows its stem
and Logos appears
and unleashes their rivers.

This man,
this woman
with their double hunger,
have tried to reach through
the curtain of God
and briefly they have,
though God
in His perversity
unties the knot.


- Anne Sexton

When getting my nose in a book
Cured most things short of school,

It was worth ruining my eyes
To know I could still keep cool,
And deal out the old right hook
To dirty dogs twice my size.

Later, with inch-thick specs,
Evil was just my lark:
Me and my coat and fangs

Had ripping times in the dark.
The women I clubbed with sex!
I broke them up like meringues.

Don't read much now: the dude
Who lets the girl down before
The hero arrives, the chap
Who's yellow and keeps the store

Seem far too familiar. Get stewed:
Books are a load of crap.

- Philip Larkin

A verdade é que vamos envelhecer, decair e morrer imenso, muito mesmo, e até lá eu quero esfolar-me a crescer, arder, voar, calcorrear, tudo isso ao teu lado, com toda a fome e sede e desejo de espremer a vida sem pensar nas horas que passam.

Preciso de ti.

E preciso de ti bem, ao meu lado, comigo, quente, quente, a molhar os meus dedos e a minha boca com o teu amor, a acolher-me dentro de ti e a ir comigo pelo resto do tempo sem pensar, sem pensar.

Adoro-te :)