A um Bruxo, Com Amor

In a certain house on Cosme Velho Street
(that opens into emptiness)
I come to visit you; and you receive me
in the room adorned with simplicity
where thoughts gone and lived
lose their yellow
once again questioning the sky and the night.

Others have read a chapter of life, you have read the whole book.
Hence this weariness in gestures and, filtered,
a light that comes from nowhere
since all the candlesticks
are extinguished.

You tell in a low voice
ways of loving and composing ministries
and tearing them down, among malinas
and bruxelas.
You know deeply
the moral geology of the Lobo Neves
and that kind of spilled eyes
that were not made for the jealous.

And you gaze at the half-dead little mouse
with the polished, meticulous curiosity
of someone who savors by association
the pleasure of Fortunato, amateur vivisectionist.
You look at war, the punch, the stab
as a simple break in universal monotony
and on your old face
an expression for which I can't find the right name
(the most subtle of world sensations):
voluptuousness of boredom?
or, greatly lascivious, of nothing?

The wind that rolls from Silvestre carries the dialogue,
and the same sound of the clock, slow, equal and dry,
like a clearing of the throat that seems to come from the time of Stoltz and the Paraná cabinet,
shows that men have died.
The earth is bare of them.
Yet, in a distant corner,
the foliage begins to whisper something
that doesn't immediately extend
to seem like the song of new mornings.
I distinguish it well, clear round:
It's Flora,
with eyes endowed with a particular movement
between sweet and pensive;
Marcela, laughing with a candid expression (and something else);
Virgília,
whose eyes give the singular sensation of moist light;
Mariana, who has them round and loving;
and Sancha, with intimate eyes;
and the large ones, of Capitu, open like the wave of the sea outside,
the sea that speaks the same language
obscure and new of D. Severina
and the bedroom slippers of Conceição.
You deciphered the irises and arms of all
and you said the ultimate and refolded reason
girl, flower woman flower
song of a new woman...
And at the foot of this music you disguise (or insinuate, who knows)
the murky grunt of pigs, concentrated and philosophical mockery
among madmen who laugh at being mad
and those who go to Misericórdia Street and don't find it.
The morning's effluvium,
who asks it of the twilight of the evening?
A presence, the clarinet,
goes step by step to seek the remedy,
but is there a remedy to exist
other than to exist?
And, for the harsher days, beyond
the moral cocaine of good books?
What crime have we committed besides living
and perhaps that of loving
not knowing whom, but loving?

All cemeteries look alike,
and you don't land on any of them, but where doubt
feels the marble of truth, to discover
the necessary crack;
where the devil plays checkers with destiny,
you are always there, allusive and mocking wizard,
who solves so many enigmas in me.

A remote and gentle sound
breaks through amidst embryos and ruins,
eternal obsequies and eternal hallelujahs,
and reaches the distraction of your dressing gown.
The groom Oblivion
knocks on the door and calls to the show
promoted to amuse the planet Saturn.
You turn the key,
wrap yourself in the cape,
and like a new Ariel, without further response,
you exit through the window, dissolve into the air.