Checkmate! the game’s over and the weary hand
Stows away the contest’s meaningless pieces,
Since, just a game, it’s nothing in the end.
1 NOVEMBER 1927
How long it’s been, ten years perhaps,
Since I’ve passed by this street!
And yet I lived here for a time—
About two years, or three.
The street’s the same, there’s almost nothing new.
But if it could see me and comment,
It would say, “He’s the same, but how I’ve changed!”
Thus our souls remember and forget.
We pass by streets and by people,
We pass our own selves, and we end;
Then, on the blackboard, Mother Intelligence
Erases the symbol, and we start again.
12 MARCH 1928
Amidst my anguish over who I am
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,
Would ask for charity but doesn’t dare.
26 JULY 1930
The harmonium faintly, dyingly whines
Somewhere in the shapeless dark.
Ah, how these chance strains of music
Cut to the quick of one’s heart!
Waving trees, rising sea, eerie stillness
Of rushes, a guitar, a voice’s moan—
All of this reaches the soul in its depths,
Where it’s completely alone!
When these sounds hurt and there is no love,
How hazy our essence feels!
Cease, O fluid consciousness!
Be shadow, O heartfelt grief!
4 AUGUST 1930
Whether I’m happy or sad? . . .
Frankly I don’t know.
What does it mean to be sad?
What is happiness good for?
I’m neither happy nor sad.
I don’t really know what I am.
I’m just one more soul that exists
And feels what God has ordained.
So then, am I happy or sad?
Thinking never ends well . . .
For me sadness means
Hardly knowing myself . . .
But that’s what happiness is . . .
20 AUGUST 1930
I want to be free and insincere,
With no creed, duty, or titled post.
I loathe all prisons, love included.
Whoever would love me, please don’t!
When I cry about what really happened
And sing about what isn’t false,
It’s because I’ve forgotten what I feel
And suppose I’m someone else.
A wanderer through my own being,
I pull songs from out of the breeze,
And my errant soul is itself
A song for singing on journeys.
Because a great and calming effect
Of nothing having a reason to be
Falls from the vacant sky like a right
Onto the worthless earth like a duty.
Dead rain from the now clear sky still soaks
The nocturnal ground, and I, just in time,
Beneath my wet clothes, remember to assume
The role of an acceptable social type.
26 AUGUST 1930
My wife, whose name is Solitude,
Keeps me from being glum.
Ah, what good it does my heart
To have this nonexistent home!
Returning there, I hear no one,
I don’t suffer the insult of a hug,
And I talk out loud without anyone hearing:
My poems are born as I go along.
Lord, if there’s some good that Heaven,
Though subject to Fate, can still grant,
Then let me be alone—a fine silk robe—
To talk by myself—a lively fan.
27 AUGUST 1930
Her very being surprises.
A tall, tawny blonde,
Of seeing her half-ripe body.
Her tall breasts resemble
(Or would, were she lying down)
Two hills in the early morning,
Even if it isn’t dawn.
And the hand of her pale arm
Rests with spread fingers
On the curved, bulging flank
Of her clothed figure.
She entices like a boat,
Or like an orange, so sweet.
When, my God, will I sail?
When, O hunger, will I eat?
10 SEPTEMBER 1930
There’s no one who loves me.
Hold on, yes there is;
But it’s hard to feel certain
About what you don’t believe in.
It isn’t out of disbelief
That I don’t believe, for I know
I’m well liked. It’s my nature
Not to believe, and not to change.
There’s no one who loves me.
For this poem to exist
I have no choice
But to suffer this grief.
How sad not to be loved!
My poor, forlorn heart!
Et cetera, and that’s the end
Of this poem I thought up.
What I feel is another matter . . .
25 DECEMBER 1930
O cat playing in the street
As if it were a bed,
I envy you your luck,
Because it isn’t luck at all.
Servant of the fatal laws
Governing stones and people,
You are ruled by instincts
And feel only what you feel.
That’s why you’re happy.
The nothing that’s you is all yours.
I look at myself but I’m missing.
I know myself: it’s not me.
JANUARY 1931
I come to the window
To see who’s singing.
A blind man and his guitar
Are out there weeping.
Both sound so sad . . .
They form a unity
That roams the world
Making people feel pity.
I’m also a blind man
Who roams and sings.
My road is longer,
And I don’t ask for anything.
26 FEBRUARY 1931
AUTOPSYCHOGRAPHY
The poet is a faker
Who’s so good at his act
He even fakes the pain
Of pain he feels in fact.
And those who read his words
Will feel in his writing
Neither of the pains he has
But just the one they’re missing.
And so around its track
This thing called the heart winds,
A little clockwork train
To entertain our minds.
1 APRIL 1931
I’m a fugitive.
I was shut up in myself
As soon as I was born,
But I managed to flee.
If people get tired
Of being in the same place,
Why shouldn’t they tire
Of having the same self?
My soul seeks me out,
But I keep on the run
And sincerely hope
I’ll never be found.
Oneness is a p
rison.
To be myself is to not be.
I’ll live as a fugitive
But live really and truly.
5 APRIL 1931
I’m guided only by reason.
I was given no other guide.
The light it sheds is useless?
I have no other light.
If the world’s Creator
Different from how I am,
He’d have made me differently.
He gave me eyes for seeing.
I look, I see, I believe.
How can I dare say:
“Blindness would be a blessing”?
Besides my gaze, God
Gave me reason, for going
Beyond what eyes can see—
The vision we call knowing.
If seeing is being deceived,
And thinking is going astray,
I don’t know. I received them
From God as my truth and way.
2 JANUARY 1932
INITIATION
You aren’t asleep under the cypress trees, For in this world there is no sleep.
Your body is the shadow of the clothes That conceal your deeper self.
When night, which is death, arrives,
The shadow ends without having been.
And you go, unawares, into that night
As the mere outline of yourself.
But at the Inn of Wonderment,
The Angels take away your cape;
You continue with no cape on your shoulders
And little else to cover you.
Then the Highway Archangels
Strip you and leave you naked,
Without any clothes, with nothing:
You have just your body, which is you.
Finally, deep within the cave,
The Gods strip you even more.
Your body, or outer soul, ceases,
But you see that they are your equals.
The shadow of your clothes remains
Among us in the realm of Destiny.
You are not dead amid cypress trees.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Neophyte, there is no death.
23 MAY 1932
Death is a bend in the road,
To die is to slip out of view.
If I listen, I hear your steps
Existing as I exist.
The earth is made of heaven.
Error has no nest.
No one has ever been lost.
All is truth and way.
23 MAY 1932
Blessed rooster that sings
Of the night that will be day!
It’s as if you raised me up
From the self in which I lay.
Your pure and shrill cry
Is the morning before it breaks.
How glad I am for the future!
The last star is already faint.
Once more, thank God, I hear
You shout your long, clear sound.
The edge of the sky grows lighter.
Why do I stop and ponder?
19 JUNE 1932
Happy those who don’t think, since life
Is their relative and gives them shelter!
Happy those who act like the animals they are!
Better, instead of children, to have just faith,
Which is not knowing who you are or what you want.
Happy those who don’t think, for they are beings,
Since being means to occupy a space
And give consciousness to a place.
29 JUNE 1932
The ancient censer swings,
Its ornate gold full of slits.
Distractedly I concentrate
On the ritual’s slow enactment.
But my heart sees and hears
Arms that are invisible,
Songs that aren’t being sung,
And censers from other planes.
For when this ritual’s performed
With perfect steps and timing,
A ritual from elsewhere awakens,
And the soul’s what it is, not has.
The visible censer swings,
Audible songs fill the air,
But the ritual I’m attending
Is a ritual of what I remember.
In the great prenatal Temple,
Before life, the soul and God . . .
And the chessboard of that ritual floor
Is today the earth and sky . . .
22 SEPTEMBER 1932
What I write’s not mine, not mine . . .
Whom do I owe it to?
Whose herald was I born to be?
How was I fooled
Into thinking that what I had was mine?
Who gave it to me?
Whatever the case, if my destiny
Is to be the death
Of another life that lives in me,
Then I, who was
By some illusion this entire
Ostensible life,
Am grateful to the One who lifted me
From the dust I am—
The One for whom I, this upraised dust,
Am just a symbol.
9 NOVEMBER 1932
Everything that exists in the world
Has a history
Except the frogs croaking in the depths
Of my memory.
Every place in the world has somewhere
To be
Except the pond from where this croaking
Is coming.
Within me a false moon rises
Over rushes,
And the pond appears, lit more and less
By the moon.
In what life, where and how, was I
What I remember
Thanks to the frogs croaking in the wake
Of what I forget?
Nothing—just silence dozing among rushes.
At the end
Of my huge old soul the frogs croak
Without me.
13 AUGUST 1933
I don’t know if that gentle land
Forgotten on a far-flung, south-sea island
Is reality, a dream, or a mixture
Of dream and life. It is, I know,
The land we long for. There, there,
Life is young and love smiles.
Perhaps nonexistent palm groves
And impossibly distant, tree-lined paths
Give peace and shade to those who believe
It’s possible to have that land.
Us happy? Ah, perhaps, perhaps,
In that land, when that time comes.
But when dreamed of, its luster fades;
Thinking of it, we soon weary of thinking.
Under the palms, by the light of the moon,
We feel the coldness of the moon’s glowing.
There just like everywhere, everywhere,
Evil doesn’t end, and good can’t endure.
Not with islands at the world’s end
Nor with palm groves, dreamed or real,
Will our soul cure its deep malaise
Or goodness enter into our heart.
Everything’s in us. It’s there, there,
That life is young and love smiles.
30 AUGUST 1933
Between my sleeping and dreaming,
Between me and the one in me
Who I suppose I am,
A river flows without end.
In its meandering journeys,
Such as all rivers make,
It passed by other, different
Shores in far-off places.
It arrived at where I now live,
At the house that I am today.
If I dwell on myself, it passes;
If I wake up, it already went by.
And the one I feel I am, who dies
In what links me to myself,
Sleeps where the river flows—
That river without end.
11 SEPTEMBER 1933
The master without disciples
Had a flawed machine
Which, despite all its levers,
Never did anything.
It served as a barrel organ
When there was no one to hear it.
When quiet, it tried to look
Curious, but no one came near it.
My soul, rather like
That machine, is flawed.
It’s complicated and erratic,
And serves no purpose at all.
13 DECEMBER 1933
SENHOR SILVA
The barber’s son passed away,
A child of just five years.