(FROM AN “INTERVIEW” WITH ALBERTO CAEIRO CONDUCTED IN VIGO)
from THE KEEPER OF SHEEP
II
My gaze is clear like a sunflower.
It is my custom to walk the roads
Looking right and left
And sometimes looking behind me,
And what I see at each moment
Is what I never saw before,
And I’m very good at noticing things.
I’m capable of feeling the same wonder
A newborn child would feel
If he noticed that he’d really and truly been born.
I feel at each moment that I’ve just been born
Into a completely new world . . .
I believe in the world as in a daisy,
Because I see it. But I don’t think about it,
Because to think is to not understand.
The world wasn’t made for us to think about it
(To think is to have eyes that aren’t well)
But to look at it and to be in agreement.
I have no philosophy, I have senses . . .
If I speak of Nature it’s not because I know what it is
But because I love it, and for that very reason,
Because those who love never know what they love
Or why they love, or what love is.
To love is eternal innocence,
And the only innocence is not to think . . .
8 MARCH 1914
IV
This afternoon a thunderstorm
Rolled down from the slopes of the sky
Like a huge boulder . . .
As when someone shakes a tablecloth
From out of a high window,
And the crumbs, because they fall together,
Make a sound when they fall,
The rain swished down from the sky
And darkened the roads . . .
As the bolts of lightning jostled space
And shook the air
Like a large head saying no,
I don’t know why (for I wasn’t afraid),
But I started to pray to St. Barbara
As if I were somebody’s old aunt . . .
Ah, by praying to St. Barbara
I felt even simpler
Than I think I am . . .
I felt common and domestic,
As if I’d lived my whole life
Peacefully, like the garden wall,
Having ideas and feelings the same way
A flower has scent and color . . .
I felt like someone who could believe in St. Barbara . . .
Ah, to be able to believe in St. Barbara!
(Do those who believe in St. Barbara
Think she’s like us and visible?
Or what then do they think of her?)
(What a sham! What do the flowers,
The trees and the sheep know
About St. Barbara? . . . The branch of a tree,
If it could think, would never
Invent saints or angels . . .
It might think that the sun
Illuminates and that thunder
Is a sudden noise
That begins with light . . .
Ah, how even the simplest men
Are sick and confused and stupid
Next to the sheer simplicity
And healthy existence
Of plants and trees!)
And thinking about all this,
I became less happy again . . .
I became gloomy and out of sorts and sullen
Like a day when a thunderstorm threatens all day
And by night it still hasn’t struck.
VI
To think about God is to disobey God,
Since God wanted us not to know him,
Which is why he didn’t reveal himself to us . . .
Let’s be simple and calm,
Like the trees and streams,
And God will love us, making us
Us even as the trees are trees
And the streams are streams,
And will give us greenness in the spring, which is its season,
And a river to go to when we end . . .
And he’ll give us nothing more, since to give us more would
make us less us.
VII
From my village I see as much of the universe as can be seen
from the earth,
And so my village is as large as any town,
For I am the size of what I see
And not the size of my height . . .
In the cities life is smaller
Than here in my house on top of this hill.
The big buildings of cities lock up the view,
They hide the horizon, pulling our gaze far away from the
open sky.
They make us small, for they take away all the vastness our
eyes can see,
And they make us poor, for our only wealth is seeing.
VIII
One midday in late spring
I had a dream that was like a photograph.
I saw Jesus Christ come down to earth.
He came down a hillside
As a child again,
Running and tumbling through the grass,
Pulling up flowers to throw them back down,
And laughing loud enough to be heard far away.
He had run away from heaven.
He was too much like us to fake
Being the second person of the Trinity.
In heaven everything was false and in disagreement
With flowers and trees and stones.
In heaven he always had to be serious
And now and then had to become man again
And get up on the cross, and be forever dying
With a crown full of thorns on his head,
A huge nail piercing his feet,
And even a rag around his waist
Like on black Africans in illustrated books.
He wasn’t even allowed a mother and father
Like other children.
His father was two different people—
An old man named Joseph who was a carpenter
And who wasn’t his father,
And an idiotic dove:
The only ugly dove in the world,
Because it wasn’t of the world and wasn’t a dove.
And his mother gave birth to him without ever having loved.
She wasn’t a woman: she was a suitcase
In which he was sent from heaven.
And they wanted him, born only of a mother
And with no father he could love and honor,
To preach goodness and justice!
One day when God was sleeping
And the Holy Spirit was flying about,
He went to the chest of miracles and stole three.
He used the first to make everyone blind to his escape.
He used the second to make himself eternally human and a
child.
He used the third to make an eternally crucified Christ
Whom he left nailed to the cross that’s in heaven
And serves as the model for all the others.
Then he fled to the sun
And descended on the first ray he could catch.
Today he lives with me in my village.
He’s a simple child with a pretty laugh.
He wipes his nose with his right arm,
Splashes about in puddles,
Plucks flowers and loves them and forgets them.
He throws stones at the donkeys,
Steals fruit from the orchards,
And runs away crying and screaming from the dogs.
And because he knows that they don’t like it
And that everyone thinks it’s funny,
He runs after the girls
Who walk in groups along the roads
Carrying jugs on their heads,
And he lifts up thei
r skirts.
He taught me all I know.
He taught me to look at things.
He shows me all the things there are in flowers.
He shows me how curious stones are
When we hold them in our hand
And look at them slowly.
He speaks very badly of God.
He says God is a sick and stupid old man
Who’s always swearing
And spitting on the floor.
The Virgin Mary spends the afternoons of eternity knitting.
And the Holy Spirit scratches himself with his beak
And perches on the chairs, getting them dirty.
Everything in heaven is stupid, just like the Catholic Church.
He says God understands nothing
About the things he created.
“If he created them, which I doubt,” he says.
“God claims, for instance, that all beings sing his glory,
But beings don’t sing anything.
If they sang, they’d be singers.
Beings exist, that’s all,
Which is why they’re called beings.”
And then, tired of speaking badly about God,
The little boy Jesus falls asleep in my lap
And I carry him home in my arms.
He lives with me in my house, halfway up the hill.
He’s the Eternal Child, the god who was missing.
He’s completely natural in his humanity.
He smiles and plays in his divinity.
And that’s how I know beyond all doubt
That he’s truly the little boy Jesus.
And this child who’s so human he’s divine
Is my daily life as a poet.
It’s because he’s always with me that I’m always a poet
And that my briefest glance
Fills me with feeling,
And the faintest sound, whatever it is,
Seems to be speaking to me.
The New Child who lives where I live
Gives one hand to me
And the other to everything that exists,
And so the three of us go along whatever road we find,
Leaping and singing and laughing
And enjoying our shared secret
Of knowing that in all the world
There is no mystery
And that everything is worthwhile.
The Eternal Child is always at my side.
The direction of my gaze is his pointing finger.
My happy listening to each and every sound
Is him playfully tickling my ears.
We get along so well with each other
In the company of everything
That we never even think of each other,
But the two of us live together,
Intimately connected
Like the right hand and the left.
At day’s end we play jacks
On the doorstep of the house,
With the solemnity befitting a god and a poet
And as if each jack
Were an entire universe,
Such that it would be a great peril
To let one fall to the ground.
Then I tell him stories about purely human matters
And he smiles, because it’s all so incredible.
He laughs at kings and those who aren’t kings,
And feels sorry when he hears about wars,
And about commerce, and about ships
That are finally just smoke hovering over the high seas.
For he knows that all of this lacks the truth
Which is in a flower when it flowers
And with the sunlight when it dapples
The hills and valleys
Or makes our eyes smart before whitewashed walls.
Then he falls asleep and I put him to bed.
I carry him in my arms into the house
And lay him down, removing his clothes
Slowly and as if following a very pure
And maternal ritual until he’s naked.
He sleeps inside my soul
And sometimes wakes up in the night
And plays with my dreams.
He flips some of them over in the air,
Piles some on top of others,
And claps his hands all by himself,
Smiling at my slumber.
When I die, my son,
Let me be the child, the little one.
Pick me up in your arms
And carry me into your house.
Undress my tired and human self
And tuck me into your bed.
If I wake up, tell me stories
So that I’ll fall back asleep.
And give me your dreams to play with
Until the dawning of that day
You know will dawn.
This is the story of my little boy Jesus,
And is there any good reason
Why it shouldn’t be truer
Than everything philosophers think
And all that religions teach?
IX
The sheep are my thoughts
And each thought a sensation.
I think with my eyes and my ears
And with my hands and feet
And with my nose and mouth.
To think a flower is to see and smell it,
And to eat a fruit is to know its meaning.
That is why on a hot day
When I enjoy it so much I feel sad,
And I lie down in the grass
And close my warm eyes,
Then I feel my whole body lying down in reality,
I know the truth, and I’m happy.
XIII
Lightly, lightly, very lightly
A very light wind passes,
And it goes away just as lightly,
And I don’t know what I’m thinking,
Nor do I wish to know.
XIV
I don’t worry about rhyme. Two trees,
One next to the other, are rarely identical.
I think and write the way flowers have color,
But how I express myself is less perfect,
For I lack the divine simplicity
Of being only my outer self.
I look and I am moved,
I am moved the way water flows when the ground slopes,
And my poetry is natural like the stirring of the wind . . .
7 MARCH 1914
XVI
If only my life were an oxcart
That creaks down the road in the morning,
Very early, and returns by the same road
To where it came from in the evening . . .
I wouldn’t have to have hopes, just wheels . . .
My old age wouldn’t have wrinkles or white hair . . .
When I was of no more use, my wheels would be removed
And I’d end up at the bottom of a ditch, broken and
overturned.
Or I’d be made into something different
And I wouldn’t know what I’d been made into . . .
But I’m not an oxcart, I’m different.
But exactly how I’m different no one would ever tell me.
4 MARCH 1914
XVII
Salad
What a medley of Nature fills my plate!
My sisters the plants,
The companions of springs, the saints
No one prays to . . .
And they’re cut and brought to our table,
And in the hotels the noisy guests
Arrive with their strapped-up blankets
And casually order “Salad,”
Without thinking that they’re requiring Mother Earth
To give her freshness and her first-born children,
Her very first green words,
The first living and gleaming things
That Noah saw
When the waters su
bsided and the hilltops emerged
All drenched and green,
And in the sky where the dove appeared
The rainbow started to fade . . .
7 MARCH 1914
XXI
If I could sink my teeth into the whole earth
And actually taste it,
I’d be happier for a moment . . .
But I don’t always want to be happy.
To be unhappy now and then
Is part of being natural.
Not all days are sunny,
And when rain is scarce, we pray for it.
And so I take unhappiness with happiness
Naturally, just as I don’t marvel
That there are mountains and plains
And that there are rocks and grass . . .
What matters is to be natural and calm
In happiness and in unhappiness,
To feel as if feeling were seeing,
To think as if thinking were walking,
And to remember, when death comes, that each day dies,
And the sunset is beautiful, and so is the night that
remains . . .
That’s how it is and how I want it to be . . .
7 MARCH 1914