Canto Negro

Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Black Song

By the edge of the black well
I lean over, can’t reach a thing
Surely I lost my sight
That I had when I was a kid

Surely I lost it, with it
That’s how I looked at you, black
A picture of bed and priest
Carved in skin, in fear

Oh, black, you laugh at me
In this little mourning outfit
And on this aimless night
Missing the dreams
That I never saw, and where I went
In a hair in the armpit

Black that I lived, sucking
I no longer know which soft breasts
Lighter on the black chest
In the long black hallway
Among swirls of black
Pipe in a black kitchen

I no longer know where you hide
That I can’t find myself in your
Folds of mortal cloak
I no longer know, black, in which vessel
That void or labyrinth
You dodge me
And mock this cold
Empty calm of Swiss and soul
In which I mourn, white
I joke, rough, sad blue
Of a neutral Scottish crest
My black, the good was ours

The bad was ours, and we loved
The common sad essence
In a sticky sweetness
Of black-maroon vulva
Cockroach! What your price
Oh bodies of the past
Was only in the gift
Of yourselves to desire
In a giving without shame
Of trodden earth
Beloved
Maybe not, but what greed
You awakened in me, line
That climbing skin to ankle
Winding around the knee
Gave the mystery of thighs
A burning beauty
A grace, a virtue
That I don’t even know how it ended
Among the bushes and clots
Of lethargic basin
Where we were amazed
Got lost, drowned
And then were compensated

Black basin, the brightness
That suddenly you revealed
Illuminates all life
And over life slightly opens
A fixed lunar curd
In this faded yellow
Of daily possessions
Black sun over cold water

I see the kids at school
Black-white-white-black
I see black feet and some white
Ivory teeth biting
The dawn of laughter hiding
Another greater blackness
The central black, the black
That darkens your darkness
And that sums up nothing more
Beyond this "solitude"
That goes from white to black
And from black returns full
Of sobs and grumbles
Like a resentment of oneself

Like a resentment of oneself
Comes from black this tenderness
This bitter wave, this breath
Rolling down the sidewalks
Starving lost voice
In a bottle of tar
Of crying or nothing at all:
This being and not being
This going like this ebbing
Dancing from the belly, liturgical
Suffering, polishing the clothes
That only an angel would wear
If angels looked at themselves
This rare nostalgic
Of a country before the others
Before the myth and the sun
Where things weren’t even called
White, throwing themselves
Definitive eternal
Things long before men