that all, the all that’s never told…

those words made of velvet

whose shade of color no one knows.

Say nothing to one who bares their soul…

the soul that cannot be bared. Confession

is indulged in simply to win calm

from listening to ourselves talking.

All useless, and false.

It’s a spinning top a boy in the street

sets going to see how it spins.

that is and contains nothing

nostalgia for nothing at all,

the desire for something fine.

I am enveloped by it

as if by a fog

and I see the last star glowing

above the stub in my ashtray

I smoked life away. How uncertain

all I saw or read!

And the whole world, a vast open book,

who pretends so completely

he even pretends to pain

the pain he really feels.

And those who read what he writes,

reading of pain, feel truly

neither of those pains he has,

but what they themselves have not.

So round its track goes

wheeling, to entertain our reason,

this string of carriages

Is that they have no hidden meaning.

It’s the strangest thing of all,

Stranger than all poets’ dreams

And all philosophers’ thoughts,

That things are really what they seem to be

And there’s nothing to understand.

Yes, this is what my senses learned on their own:

Things have no meaning: they have existence.

Because, at certain stage,

people have to be tired.

Of what I am tired, I don’t know:

It would not serve me at all to know

Since the tiredness stays just the same.

The wound hurts as it hurts

And not in function of the cause that produced it.

Yes, I am tired,

And ever so slightly smiling

At the tiredness being only this -

In the body a wish for sleep,

In the soul a desire for not thinking

And, to crown all, a luminous transparency

Of the retrospective understanding …

And the one luxury of not now having hopes?

I am intelligent: that’s all.

I have seen much and understood much of what I

have seen.

And there is a certain pleasure even in tiredness

this brings us,

Listening to what I say.

They doze, dream, fade out.

Not listening. I talk away.

I tell what I’ve told, out of listless

Sadness, so often before …

I think you never listened,

So you’re away you are.

All of a sudden, an absent

Stare, you look at me, still

Immeasurably distant,

You begin a smile.

I go on talking. You

Go on listening - your own

Thoughts you listen to,

The smile as good as gone,

Until, through the loafing

Afternoon’s waste of while,

The silence self-unleafing

I think of you and within myself I’m complete.

A light breeze comes to me from across the hazy fields.

I think of you and whisper your name. I’m not I: I’m happy.

Tomorrow you’ll come and walk with me and pick flowers in

the fields.

And I’ll walk with you in the fields watching you pick

flowers.

I already see you tomorrow picking flowers with me in the fields,

But when you come tomorrow and really walk with me and

pick flowers,

by itself

And seeing it always in ways different from when I see her in

person.

I fashion thoughts from my memory of how she is when she

talks to me,

And in each thought she’s a variation on her likeness.

To love is to think.

And from thinking of her so much, I almost forget to feel.

I don’t really know what I want, even from her, and she’s all I

think of.

My distraction is as large as life.

When I feel like being with her,

I almost prefer not being with her,

So as not to have to leave her afterwards.

And I prefer thinking about her, because I’m a little afraid of

her as she really is.

I don’t really know what I want, and I don’t even want to

know what I want.

All I want is to think her.

I no longer know how to walk the roads alone,

For I’m no longer able to walk alone.

A visible thought makes me walk faster

And see less, and at the same time enjoy all I see.

Even her absence is something that’s with me.

And I like her so much I don’t know how to desire her.

If I don’t see her, I imagine her and am strong like the tall

trees.

But if I see her I tremble, I don’t know what’s happened to

what I feel in her absence.

The whole of me is like a force that abandons me.

Unless it’s because a sunset isn’t a sunrise.

Steeped in feeling myself, I sleep. In this

Calm hour my thought forgets its thinking,

My soul has no soul.

If I exist, it’s wrong to know it. If I

Wake up, I feel I’m mistaken. I just don’t know.

There’s nothing I want, have, or remember.

I have no being or law.

A moment of consciousness between illusions,

I’m bounded all around by phantoms.

Sleep on, oblivious to other people’s hearts,

A thought lifts its brow straight up,

Like a tower. In the vast solitude

Of a soul all alone it’s as if

My heart possessed knowledge and a brain.

I consist of an artificial bitterness,

Faithful to I don’t know what idea.

Like a make-believe courtesan, I don

Majestic robes in which I exist

For the artificial presence of the king.

Yes, all I am and want are but dreams.

Everything slipped out of my slack hands.

I wait forlornly, arms just hanging there—

A beggar who, having spent all his hopes,

I’ll stop seeing it. I also

Love it because it is.

In this calm moment when I feel myself

By loving more than by being,

I love all existence and myself.

No better thing could the primitive gods

Give me, were they to return—

Why refuse me what I don’t ask of you?

You’ll have time to refuse

After you’ve given.

Flower, be a flower to me! If, ungenerous, you’re plucked

By the hand of the ill-omened sphinx, you’ll wander forever

As an absurd shadow,

And the hand of mystery that stills the hubbub,

And the weariness weighing on everything in us, hindering

An active and accurate feeling of Life!

Each street is a canal in a Venice of tediums,

And how mysterious the unanimous end of the streets

When the night falls, O my master Cesário Verde,

Who wrote “Sentiment of a Westerner”!

What profound restlessness, what longing for other things

That aren’t countries or moments or lives!

What longing for perhaps other kinds of moods

Inwardly moistens this lingering, remote instant!

A horror that sleepwalks among the city’s first lights,

A mild and fluid terror that leans against street corners

Like a beggar waiting for impossible sensations

Without knowing who might bestow them . . .

When I die,

When I go away—ingloriously, like everyone—

Down that road whose very idea we can’t face directly,

Through that door we’d never take if we could choose,

Toward that port that’s unknown to the captain of the Ship,

Let it be at this hour of day, worthy of all the tedium I’ve

suffered,

This ancient and spiritual and mystical hour,

This hour in which perhaps, much longer ago than it seems,

Plato, dreaming, saw the idea of God

Shaping body and existence as something perfectly plausible

In his thoughts externalized like a field.

Let it be at this hour that you take me off to be buried,

At this hour when I don’t know how to live,

When I don’t know what to feel or pretend I feel,

At this hour whose mercy is tortured and excessive,

Whose shadows come from something other than things,

Whose passing drags no robes over the ground of

Sensible Life

Nor leaves any fragrance on the paths of Sight.

Cross your hands on your knee, O consort I don’t have or

wish to have,

Cross your hands on your knee and look at me in silence

At this hour when I can’t see that you’re looking at me,

Look at me in silence and in secret, and ask yourself