She died, but I’ll always be her little boy,
Because no one, for his mother, is ever a man!
And even through tears my memory
Still preserves
The perfect medallion image
Of that yet more perfect profile.
My forever childish heart weeps
When I remember you, mother, so Roman and already
graying.
I see your fingers at the keyboard, and the moonlight
Outside shines eternally in me.
In my heart you play, without ceasing,
Un Soir à Lima.
“Did the little ones go right to sleep?”
“Yes, right to sleep.”
“This girl here is almost asleep.”
And, smiling as you spoke, you continued
Playing,
Attentively playing,
Un Soir à Lima.
All I was when I wasn’t anyone,
All I loved and only now know
I loved, now that I have no remotely
Real path, now that I have only
Nostalgia for what was—
It all lives in me
Through lights and music
And my heart’s undying vision
Of that eternal hour
In which you turned
The unreal page of music
And I heard and saw you
Continue the eternal melody
That lives today
In the eternal depths of my nostalgia
For the time when you, mother, played
Un Soir à Lima.
And the indifferent receiver
Transmits from the unconscious station
Un Soir à Lima.
I didn’t know then that I was happy.
I know it now, because I no longer am.
“This girl here is also sleeping . . .”
“No she isn’t.”
We all smiled,
And I,
Far from the hard and lonely
Moon that shone outside,
Absentmindedly kept listening
To what made me dream without realizing it,
To what nowadays makes me feel sorry for myself,
That gentle song without voice, just the sounds
Of the keys my mother played:
Un Soir à Lima.
If only I could have that entire scene
Right here, complete and distilled,
Tucked away in a drawer,
Tucked in one of my pockets!
If only I could yank
From space, from time, from life,
That living room, that hour,
The whole family and that peace and that music,
Isolating it all
In some part of my soul
Where I could have it
Forever
Alive, warm,
As real as it is back there
Even now,
When, mother, dear mother, you played
Un Soir à Lima.
Mother, mother, I was your boy
Whom you taught to be
So well-behaved,
And today I’m a rag
Rolled into a ball by Destiny and tossed
Into a corner.
There I pathetically lie,
But the memory of what I heard and what I knew
Of affection, of home and of family
Rises to my heart in a swirl,
And remembering it I heard, today, my God,
all alone,
Un Soir à Lima.
Where is that hour, that home, that love
From when, mother, dear mother, you played
Un Soir à Lima?
And my sister,
Tiny and snuggled up in a stuffed chair,
Didn’t know
If she was sleeping or not . . .
I’ve been so many vile things!
I’ve been so unfaithful to who I am!
How often my parched,
Has abundantly erred!
How often even my emotion
Has unfeelingly deceived me!
Since I have no home,
May I at least dwell
In this vision
Of the home I had then.
May I at least listen, listen, listen,
There by the window
Of never again ceasing to feel,
In that living room, our warm
living room
In capacious Africa where the moon
Outside shines vast and indifferent,
Neither good nor bad,
And where, mother,
In my heart, mother,
You visibly play,
You eternally play
Un Soir à Lima.
My stepfather
(What a man! what heart and soul!)
Reclined his calm and robust
Athlete’s body
In the largest chair
And listened, smoking and musing,
His blue eyes without any color.
And my sister, then a child,
Curled up in her chair,
Heard while sleeping
And smiling
That someone was playing
Perhaps a dance . . .
And I, standing before the window,
Saw all the moonlight of all Africa flooding
The landscape and my dream.
Where did all of that go?
Un Soir à Lima . . .
Shatter, heart!
But I’m dizzy.
I don’t know if I’m seeing or if I’m sleeping,
If I am who I was,
If I’m remembering or if I’m forgetting.
Something hazily flows
Between who I am and what I was,
And it’s like a river, or a breeze, or a dreaming,
Something unexpected
That suddenly stops,
And from the depths where it seemed it would end
There emerges, more and more clearly,
In a nimbus of softness and nostalgia
Where my heart still lingers,
A piano, a woman’s figure, a longing . . .
I sleep in the lap of that melody,
Listening to my mother play,
Listening, now with the salt of tears on my tongue,
to Un Soir à Lima.
The veil of tears does not blind me.
Crying, I see
What that music gives me—
The mother I had, that home from long ago,
The child I was,
The horror of time because it flows,
The horror of life because it only kills.
I see, and fall asleep,
And in my torpor, having forgotten
I still exist in the world of today,
I watch my mother play.
Those small white hands,
Whose caresses will never again comfort me,
Play on the piano, carefully and calmly,
Un Soir à Lima.
Ah, I see everything clearly!
I’m back there once more.
I turn away my eyes that had been gazing
At the uncommon moon outside.
But wait, my mind rambles, and the music is over . . .
I ramble as I’ve always rambled,
With no inner certainty about who I am,
Nor any real faith or firm rule.
I ramble, I create my own eternities
With the opium of memory and abandon.
I enthrone fantastical queens
But have no throne for them to sit on.
I dream because I wallow
In the unreal river of that recollected music.
My soul is a ragged child
Sleeping in a dusky corner.
All I have of my own
In true, waking reality
Are the tatters of my abandoned soul
And my head that’s dre
aming next to the wall.
Some God to save all this from futility,
Some other world in which this lives on?
I continue to ramble: everything is illusion.
Un Soir à Lima . . .
Shatter, heart . . .
17 SEPTEMBER 1935
ADVICE
Surround who you dream you are with high walls.
Then, wherever the garden can be seen
Through the iron bars of the gate,
Plant only the most cheerful flowers,
So that you’ll be known as a cheerful sort.
Where it can’t be seen, don’t plant anything.
Lay flower beds, like other people have,
So that passing gazes can look in
At your garden as you’re going to show it.
But where you’re all your own and no one
Ever sees you, let wild flowers spring up
Spontaneously, and let the grass grow naturally.
Make yourself into a well-guarded
Double self, letting no one who looks in
See more than a garden of who you are—
A showy but private garden, behind which
The native flowers brush against grass
So straggly that not even you see it . . .
[AUTUMN 1935?]
AT THE TOMB OF CHRISTIAN ROSENKREUTZ
We had still not seen the corpse of our wise and prudent Father, and so we moved the altar to one side. Then we could raise a strong plate of yellow metal, and there lay a beautiful, illustrious body, whole and uncorrupted . . . , and in his hand he held a small parchment book, written in gold and entitled T., which, after the Bible, is our greatest treasure, one that should not be lightly submitted to the world’s censure.
FAMA FRATERNITATIS ROSEAE CRUCIS
I
When, awakened from this sleep called life,
We find out what we are and what
This fall into Body was, this descent
Into the Night that obstructs our Soul,
Will we finally know the hidden
Truth about all that exists or flows?
No: not even the freed Soul knows it.
Nor does God, who created us, contain it.
God is the man of a yet higher God.
A Supreme Adam, He also fell.
Our Creator, He was also created,
And was cut off from the Truth. The Abyss,
His Spirit, hides it from Him in the beyond.
In the World, His Body, it doesn’t exist.
II
Before all that there was the Word, here lost
When the already extinguished Infinite Light
Was raised from Chaos, the ground of Being,
Into Shadow, and the absent Word was obscured.
But though it feels its form is wrong, the Soul sees
At last in itself—mere Shadow—the glowing
Word of this World, human and anointed,
The Perfect Rose, crucified in God.
Lords, then, on the threshold of the Heavens,
We may search beyond God for the Secret
Of our Master and the higher Good;
Wakened from here and from ourselves,
we’re freed
At last in Christ’s present blood from worshiping
The God who makes the created World die.
III
Ah, but here where we still wander, unreal,
We sleep what we are, and although in dreams
We may at last see the truth, we see it
(Since our seeing is a dream) distortedly.
Shadows seeking bodies, how will we feel
Their reality if we find them?
What, as Shadows, can we touch with our shadowy
Hands? Our touch is absence and vacancy.
Who will free us from this closed Soul?
We can hear, if not see, beyond the hall
Of being, but how make the door swing open?
Lying before us, calm in his false death
And with the shut Book pressed against his chest,
Our Rosy Cross Father knows, and says nothing.
[AUTUMN 1935?]
PEDROUÇOS2
When I was little I didn’t know
I’d grow up.
Or I knew but didn’t feel it.
Time at that age doesn’t exist.
Each day it’s the same kitchen table
With the same backyard outside,
And sadness, when felt,
Is sadness, but you aren’t sad.
That’s how I was,
And all the children in the world
Were that way before me.
A wooden latticework fence,
Tall and fragile,
Divided the huge backyard
Into a vegetable garden and a lawn.
My heart has become forgetful
But not my eyes. Don’t steal from them, Time,
That picture in which the happy boy I was
Gives me a happiness that’s still mine!
Your cold flowing means nothing
To a man who cuddles up in memories.
22 OCTOBER 1935
There are sicknesses worse than any sickness;
There are pains that don’t ache, not even in the soul,
And yet they’re more painful than those that do.
There are anxieties from dreams that are more real
Than the ones life brings; there are sensations
Felt only by imagining them
That are more ours than our very own life.
There are countless things that exist
Without existing, that lastingly exist
And lastingly are ours, they’re us . . .
Over the muddy green of the wide river
The white circumflexes of the seagulls . . .
Over my soul the useless flutter
Of what never was nor could be, and it’s everything.
Give me more wine, because life is nothing.
19 NOVEMBER 1935
from MESSAGE
FROM PART ONE / COAT OF ARMS
COAT OF ARMS: THE CASTLES
Europe, stretched out from East to West
And propped on her elbows, stares
From beneath her romantic hair
With Greek eyes, remembering.
Her left elbow is pulled back;
Her right forms an angle.
The first, which lies flat, says Italy;
The second says England and extends
The hand that holds up her face.
She stares with a fatal, sphinxian gaze
At the West, the future of the past.
The staring face is Portugal.
8 DECEMBER 1928
COAT OF ARMS: THE SHIELDS
What the Gods give they sell.
The price of glory is adversity.
Pity the happy, for they are only
What is passing!
Let those for whom enough is enough
Have just enough to feel they have enough!
Life is brief, the soul is vast:
Having is procrastinating.
God, when He defined Christ
With adversity and disgrace,
Opposed him to Nature
And anointed him Son.
8 DECEMBER 1928
ULYSSES
Myth is the nothing that is everything.
The very sun that breaks through the skies
Is a bright and speechless myth—
God’s dead body,
Naked and alive.
This hero who cast anchor here,
Because he never was, slowly came to exist.
Without ever being, he sufficed us.
Having never come here,
He came to be our founder.
Thus the legend, little by little,
Seeps into reality
And constantly enriches i
t.
Life down below, half
Of nothing, perishes.
VIRIATO
If our feeling and acting soul has knowledge
Only by remembering what it forgot,
Our race lives because in us
The memory of your instinct survived.
A nation thanks to your reincarnation,
A people because you resurrected
(You or what you represented)—
That’s how Portugal took shape.
Your being is like the cold
Light that precedes daybreak
And is already the stirrings of day
In the dark chaos on the brink of dawn.
22 JANUARY 1934
HENRY, COUNT OF BURGUNDY
Every beginning is involuntary.
God is the prime mover.
The hero is his own spectator,
Uncertain and unaware.
You gaze at the sword you found
In your hands.
“What shall I do with this sword?”
You raised it, and it did the doing.