Three Poems

Lêdo Ivo

The Earth Is Round

The earth is round.
Along the edge of this immensely curved world,
your genealogy passed, wandering under the wind and stars.
Through echelons of the great chimerical sea
they were fletchers, boatmen, millers, squires, foreigners, apothecaries, vintners and masons.
They were cartographers and mercenaries, mariners and warriors, these people and these lands,
a lineage that in your blood finds a berth.
And now the world is round
the cosmos is a round infinity
lighthouses and mirrors are magnificent zeros
love is round like the breasts of barmaids
and the earth is round as an orange.
Even the amazing ocean is rounded like a balloon.
And circular are the coiled sails and ships along the horizon’s whirling funnel.
We all live in a beautifully round world.
Round are the stadiums and the roar of the crowds
when during night games the white spherical star rolls across the mowed grass.
Round are those who have fallen and coffins
that tumultuous death stamps round.
Life itself is a round thing
so that when we go wrong, we go wrong roundly,
in our innocent white lie we are deeply deceived
and when we fall, we fall roundly to the ground
procedurally round in the hypnotic day.
Our coins are round as Caesar’s image.

Round is demagogy, with its circumlocution and anacolutha.
Something not very round makes circular
the square yellow face of the poor.
Yes is a round syllable that dances
in conventionally round mouths,
round from so much denial and concession, lying and telling the truth,
and they round off more each passing year.
The screaking mouth of man, rhetorically round,
uses anaptyxis to flatter the powerful,
resorts to conjunctions for evictions, uses syllepsis for collateral,
applies litotes in denunciations and hypocorism in persecutions.
Man’s slobbering mouth distinguishes itself with anastrophe to indict the innocent
and hypallage to justify slaughter,
adopts the ablative absolute to incarcerate petty thieves,
does not give up on paragoge during the processions,
and lets the thick oil of hyperbole drip on his neighbor,
since the world, being round, is naturally hyperbolic
with all its inhabitants.




Fruit in 1940

Fruit was immovable and forgotten.
No one could ever reach it.
It was sort of carried along
by powerful fruit on the move.
We could contemplate it on your table
where no knife could split it.
We could contemplate it en route to the Indies,
in Porto Alegre or in any ballad.

There was someone who divided up the fruit
into four equal fruits
that remained
intact and forever fruit—
sweet, full, pungent, and luminous.




Identities

Victor Hugo was absolutely sure that Victor Hugo was a pseudonym for God,
and considered himself the property of the earth, sea, and sky.
Rimbaud did not know he was Rimbaud, which is why he abandoned his wanderings in Europe
and went to live in Africa.
Byron knew he was Byron
so much so that he fled England
and screwed his own sister.
Walt Whitman always deemed himself Walt Whitman.
He loved America, and the erect penises of his comrades
as though they were future skyscrapers.
Baudelaire saw in the mirror the abyss that he swallowed.
Paul Claudel believed he was the replacement for God
and spewed himself out in copious white lines
celebrating the beauty of the universe.
Tristan Corbière, on his deathbed,
heard the shrieking of gulls on the beach of his childhood
and convinced himself that he was Tristan Corbière.
In Paris, Jules LaForgue searched in vain for a place to sit.
It was winter. Every bench in the Luxembourg Gardens was wet
and moon-white death awaited him in a sky colder than earth.
The doubt of being Paul Valéry
tormented Valéry his whole life,
especially in the morning, when he would search for the lost self
among the night’s enigmatic dreams.
The conviction of being T.S. Eliot precisely upon waking
inspired his professorial air and impeccable white shirts.
The suspicion of being Rainer Maria Rilke
came to Rainer Maria Rilke in his final days
when, in the solitude of the Muzot castle,
he reached for a rose.
To be Mallarmé, Mallarmé hid himself like a faun in the woods of a blank page
and heard the song of the sirens
mingled with the train whistles of the Gare Saint-Lazare.
Paul Verlaine did not care whether he was or was not Paul Verlaine.
He knew that in fall the leaves are scattered by the wind.
This is fundamental.
The rest is literature.

translated from the Portuguese by Andrew Gebhardt