A DAY LIKE ANY OTHER

Five white butterflies

slicing the pie of the sky.

Eight ravens flying

out welcome me back from my

morning walk to the newstand.

 BLOOD MOON ECLIPSE

Two bats shadowing
the bricks, leaves shaking silence
like tissue paper.
Our sun is a quiet thumb
nudging the moon's arteries.

We are blind, severed
heads tumbled and lost among
wax wings yellowing
in corners of History's
ever-expectant dustbin.

A cycle begins
again:  this sun disappears,
blood drains from its moon,
more stars are born from darkness
to light up our new, sixth world.

NINGHT MOVES, PUERTO ÁNGEL

NIGHT MOVES, PUERTO ÁNGEL

"nada, nada podrá ser más amargo
que el mar que llevo adentro, solo y ciego."

(nothing, nothing could be more bitter
than the sea I carry inside me, alone and blind.)

Nocturno mar
Xavier Villaurrutia (1903-1950)


I am reluctant,
now, to write poems again.
Ravens take the words,
like bitter bites of rye bread,
out of my mouth and carry

them to the highest
branch in this battered garden
where I am living.
I cannot demand them back,
now, but I can remember

those poems written
at midnight in my little
house above the beach
while Raven sang to the waves
along with Barbieri's

surfing saxaphone
and tiny red crabs climbed to
hide in the tiled roof
until fishing boats crawled out
over the waves of breaking

moonlight through the bay
into the open ocean.
Ten years ago the
sea of possibilities
was as wide as the planet--

now it's the water
tank under the tallest tree
where mosquitoes breed
nocturnal tempests in my
imagination's darkness.

April 2013

Chihuahua ravens
in my garden wake me up
to break up their bread.
An unkindness of ravens
they are--only slightly more

sophisticated
than a murder of crows--but
unmated brothers
returning every spring
to help feed the new ones seems

so charitable
that I make myself get up
and put out breakfast
in a tray on my back porch.
While I'm making coffee they

swoop down for the bits
of sourdough, then head for
the jacaranda.
Cackles and coffee convince
me to accept my own life.

BELATED RECOGNITIONS

Twenty Years Later:  Santa Fe and Karma

To digest past lives
you must chew them, then swallow.
Santa Fe was full
to the clouds with folks jumping
onto tables, shutting their

eyes and careening,
seemingly, like particles
in a centrifuge
through dozens of previous
lifetimes in an hour or two.

Waitresses, doubling
as rebirthers, picked up the
pieces of Caesars,
Napoleons and Joans of
Arc, delivering them new

as bouncing infants
and recommending a change
of name to one more
fitting a newborn being
ready to gambol under

the curious eyes
of coyotes out in the
chamisa bushes.
While the regressers hoped to
make the big time, waiting for

calls from the talk shows,
the poor rebirthers just hoped
they could pay the rent.
The truth is, sometimes a life
you didn't know you had lived

sneaks up from behind
and knocks you flat on your face--
and you have to start
from uneasy beginnings
reliving its errors and

frustrations, knowing
full well you won't get out of
it alive this time,
either.  But you bite your way
like a beaver pulping dead

wood, through the log jams
of fragmented memories,
becoming pregnant
with sawdust, hoping to give
birth to a sheet of paper

on which you can write
the story of a new life.
Until another
old life ambushes you, and
another, and another,

and soon you are full
of lives; like a fish filled with
eggs moves heavily
in the current, you are washed
clean in multiplicity.

BELATED RECOGNITIONS

4)

47 Years Later:  Robert Lowell in Meany Hall

"I wrote to remember."
Salman Rushdie

Life Studies was a
critical passage for those
of us who came of
age as poets in the mid-
Sixties.  Lowell, finally

loose from confinement,
had forced open the steel teeth
of formalism
to hang out his whole life on
the clothesline of confession,

and we wedged ourselves
into Meany Hall to see
how that looked and felt.
Lowell stll had about him
something of the posture of

a marionette,
but his voice plunged and rambled
deep in the abyss
below the Quaker graveyard,
flattening his New England

"r"s into awestruck
discoveries of just how
sick we really were--
all of us narcissistic
nabobs navel-picking our

way to Vietnam
or Latin America
or the Congo like
moles who had lost our groove in
a tunnel of sprung rythm.

I read my poem
"Homecoming" for Lowell in
John Logan's workshop,
and when he pronounced it good
I felt a star stick to my

forehead lik a cross
of ashes.  Anointed as
a Poet, I walked
out of the seminar room
leaving heelprints in the clouds.

Where was I going
in those pistachio slingback
sandals, anyway?
All these many years later
have I still no idea?

Perhaps the journey
IS that which really matters
when all our subway
tunnels empty out into
the same nameless boulevard.

BELATED RECOGNITIONS

1)

34 Years Late: "Love is just like baseball"(Michael Franks)


It was 34
years ago: We stopped to look
at Snoqualmie Falls
when you quoted Harry Lime
in The Third Man that people

were really ants, and
I asked if you believed that.
You didn't, but the
falls reminded you vaguely
of a ferris wheel whirling

that May afternoon
as we sat on a fir log
eating the picnic
lunch I had packed in an old
green tin hamper. Then you showed

me how to work the
borrowed Pentax and I made
images of your
oversized hands, your subdued
afro and you tried not to

squint against the sun.
Later, before the ball game
I teetered across
the astroturf in the old
King Dome on the same heeled mules

I wore up the trails,
freeze-framing action shots of
your warm-up pitches,
kicking off the first inning
of our battle to control

the relationship.
We had a past, you maintained:
I as the macho,
you as the oppressed wife, and
it was time to sort things out.

2)

After Almost 50 Years: A Response to Sylvia Plath's Death

Outside my window
orange trumpets explode
in fanfares high up
in a tree in my garden;
they dispute it with ravens

seeing who can make
the loudest announcement of
a new afternoon.
If I could pick a place to
die, and I think I might have:

Here, in the tropics,
where death is warm, is the spot--
where the colors write
my requiem and birds chant
its top line for my spirit.

3)

27 Years Later:  Sept. 19th

It rained hard all night,
and half the band of orange
trumpets is flattened
in the mud of my garden.
The adolescent ravens

waiting for sun to
the end-of-hurricane-
season bubble hide
in the trees, while their stale bread
dampens on my stair landing.

Forgotten coffee
steams and warbles on the stove.
On the balcony
my small french bean plants hunker
down behind the closed curtains.

We are all wating
for a change: a blast of sun,
a clap of thunder,
or even an earthquake, so
that we can have breakfast.

Requiem for Antonio Tabucchi (September 24, 1943 – March 25, 2012)

Prologue:

"Don't come to me with conclusions!
The only conclusion is to die."
 Alvaro de Campos (Fernando Pessoa)

I have taken your
death very personally.
After pursuing
Pessoa down the streets and
up the hills of Lisboa,

where he is nowhere
and everywhere to be
found--with my only
reliable reference
in hand your novels and one

of Saramago's
in which Ricardo Reis
enjoys 9 long months
of autonomous pleasure
after his host creator

died and cut him loose
to wander the rua do
alecrim killing
time before paying respects
to the imagination

dreaming his death in
Prazeres Cemetery--
you have left me in the lurch:
waiting for answers on the

dock of the Tejo--
just like your narrator in
Requiem, who shows
up at noon for a meeting
set for midnight and spends the

afternoon sweating
and hallucinating his
way though encounters
with his own dead creator,
best friend and phantom lover.

1.

"I'm dreaming, but it seems to me that everything is real and I have to
meet up with some people who only exist in my memory."
A. Tabucchi, Requiem

My first encounter with Antonio Tabucchi was in Saltillo, in the north of Mexico. Only one f his novels was lurking in the public library:  Sostiene Pereira (something on the order of Pereria Maintains), which was made into a film starring Marcello Mastroianni in 1995 (one of his last, and which I have not yet seen).

The central aspect that I have found out about Mexican public libraries is that they are only sufficient for a little less than one school year of reading--by then I have read everything in their collection that I cared to read, and quite a few that I didn't.  So I don't know if Saltillo has ever added to its lone Tabucchi, but all the other novels I have read by him I purchased--either in internet, or trawling the used bookstores on calle Donceles in Mexico City's Centro Historico or in the Libreria Gandhi--also in Mexico City.  I still have not been able to lay my hands on a copy of The Last Three Days of Fernando Pessoa--the one I desperately wanted to read before describing my own version of those days in Pursuing Pessoa, even though they have been documented and speculated about in other venues.

One of the aspects of Tabucchi and his work which most caught my attention was that he wrote in more than one language--something that we had in common.  Because of his interest in Pessoa, in pursuing Pessoa, a result of his time spent in Lisbon was his novel, Requiem, which he wrote in Portugese and which had to be translated into Italian in order to be published in his country of origin.  That novel was later successfully translated into francophone cinema by the Swiss director Alain Tanner.

Tabucchi continued to pursue Pessoa in Lisbon, eventually acquiring Portugese citizenship, and more recently, his ashes were placed in the Prazeres Cemetery.

I would have to make another trip to Lisbon to determine the location of his niche in respect to Pessoa's tomb, as well as its location in respect to the niche of the fictional Tadeus Slowaki, the best fiend of the narrator of Requiem--supposedly in First street, right side, number 4664.  That would mean making my first visit to the Prazeres Cemetery, as I did not visit Pessoa's tomb in November of 2011, given my almost uncanny rotten luck at finding people in cemeteries.  And that would also mean making the acquaintance of the current version of the cemetery guard from Requiem, who given the frequently surreal atmosphere of Lisbon, might well be eating a lunch of Feijoada, and might also tell me that he eats Feijoada every day because it is the only dish that his wife knows how to prepare.

If I were to make another visit, this time with the objective of pursuing Tabucchi--or at least looking for the niche with his ashes--I would feel obligated to take the train to Oporto and pursue there the gypsy caravans of his novel.  So we'd be talking now about a longer visit than the two weeks I spent trudging up and down the hills of Lisbon in search of Pessoa's footprints.

2. 

"It seems that sometimes I wake up
and ask myself what I lived.
It was clear, it was real, it was true,
but how is it that I arrived here?"
Fernando Pessoa

I was visiting in Tucson, Arizona, when I saw the news that Tabucchi had died.  I was upset.  No more novels, no more essays on the order of Plato's Gastritis--unless, of course, he had also left an enormous trunk bulging with unpublished manuscripts in Lisbon, like Pessoa left in his room on the rua da coelho da rocha (coincidentally, an easy walk from the Prazeres Cemetery). 

During the past few years I have been left in the lurch by Manuel Vazquez Montalban (no more Pepe Carvalho mysteries, no more essays on gastronomia de Aragon, no more narratives of visits with controversial Latin American leaders such as Fidel Castro and Subcomandante Marcos), Jose Saramago (who must have taken his overcoat and gone off with Ricardo Reis and Pessoa, but whose ashes are buried at the base of an olive tree in Alfama not far from the river in Lisbon, in front of the Casa dos Bicos that is now opening as the Saramago Foundation) and Cuban/Mexican writer Eliseo Alberto (La eternidad empieza el lunes), for whom eternidad began with a bang and left me whimpering in my nostalgia for laughter.

But Tabucchi's death had an uncomfortably macabre aftershock here in Mexico, when a few days later (Saturday, March 31st) one of his translators, the poet Guillermo Fernandez, was murdered in his house in Toluca, capital of the state of Mexico.  He was found tied to a kitchen chair with brown packing tape wrapped around his head--the back of which had been caved in by a blunt instrument.  The newspapers always refer to that sort of occurrence as a brutal muder--as if there were kind and gentle murders--but this one more than qualifies for that banal description.

For me, it's more than a bad dream that the lights have gone out for both Tabucchi and one of his translators, Fernandez, although it's also a bit off that it was not his translator from Portugese to Spanish who was murdered, but a translator from Italian.  But murders are messy and occur in the real world, not in the surreal world of Lisbon--and their lack of symmetry is notorious.

3.

"A Requiem should be written in Latin...but I am not very good at Latin."
A. Tabucchi, author's note to Requiem

Unfortunately, although I was for a time very good at Latin, that was nearly 50 years ago--which may as well have been in another lifetime--perhaps even during the time of the great North African pet Terence,, who was much better at Latin than I was.

A Requiem, by rights, should be SUNG.  I probably remember more of the Requiem Mass which I simply memorized in grade school than of its meaning:  Dies Irae (the 13th century Days of Wrath as the Black Plague closed in like a fist) and the more upbeat In Paradisum (as the body is carried out of the church)--both shoehorned into or tacked onto the ordinary of the mass.

If I still had my sweat-grubbied copy of Chants of the Church (in the 50s the spirit of ecumenism had not yet raised its head, and The Church was exclusively Roman Catholic) I could knock out a Requiem Mass for Tabucchi in almost nothing flat.  As it is about all I can do is thank his spirit for having written several exquisitely beautiful books (if the term exquisite has not been so debased as to no longer reside in the canon of acceptable modifiers), for having widened the channel of my interest in Pessoa that first opened when I read Saramago's The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis and for having convinced me that a pilgrimage to Lisbon to wait on the edge of the river Tejo for the phantom of Pessoa to appear might very well be one of the very few--if not the only pilgrimage worth undertaking in this depressingly virulent first century of a new millennium.

Things have, in fact, changed since the time of Terence, who wrote that he was human, and therefore nothing human was alien to him.  I have come to the conclusion, without yet dying, that I don't want any part of most of what passes for human these days.  About all that's left of that which is human that is of interest to me is the imagination, and there is such a sorrowful lack of that now that the passing of a truly imaginative writer such as Antonio Tabucchi leaves an enormous hole in the pattern of humanity's carpet.

Requiescat in pace.

PLAYING FOR TIME?

In memory of the comic genius of Karel Svenk (1907-45)

Terezin was a

model ghetto created

to dazzle the Red

Cross not all that far from Prague,

with a cafeteria,

a kindergarten,

a school, a synagogue,

shops and concert halls.

For more than a year the trains

cancelled passenger service

to Auschwitz, and life

was a cabaret: Mahler

and Mendelssohn were

more than fashionable and

the musical theater

of Karel Svenk's "Last

Cyclist", an inside gander

at dictatorship

that begged nothing from Chaplin,

tunneled under the structure

of the Reich to packed

houses most every night.

The cyclists wore Cs

on their jackets: No doubt their

grandfathers had shamelessly

pedaled through the streets

of Prague on their bicycles.

When the starry-eyed

Red Cross folks left Terezin,

the trains began to recruit

passengers en masse,

and Svenk caught a quick one for

a roundabout trip

to Meuselwitz, near Leipzig,

where forced factory work on

an empty stomach

punched his ticket--just as this

small child began to

listen to the V.E. Day

hooplah on the radio.

INTIMATIONS OF THE NEXT WORLD

23.

"We can't go on
living in shame,
breaking the rules
of the game."
Robbie Robertson

This solstice the sun
rises over fields of blood:
Iraq, Syria,
the 60 thousand dead in
Mexico's new Dirty War

against its people:
student protesters gunned down
on a highway in
Guerrero just last week, and
narco gangs have the green light

to massacre folks
going home for Christmas on
Veracruz buses.
The gringos withdraw their troops
from Iraq, leaving a huge

embassy (the size
of El Salvador), thousands
of mercenaries
and a sectarian war
exploding everywhere.

In Cairo: army
exceptionalism and
privilege pitted
against the demands for rights
yields a mounting death toll and

no gentle good night;
sticks and stones against billions
in gringo weapons.
"The U.S. just buys countries",
says my nephew Max, "That's their

foreign policy."
Once paid for, the people are
ducks passing in a
shooting gallery: Target
practice. In Panama, 5

thousand victims of
new U.S. weapons come back
to their barrio,
a piquant patchwork mola
of souls stitched by Kuna hands.

PURSUING PESSOA


16. Epilogue


If the measure of success of any pursuit is the finding of its object, I would have to say that my pursuit of Pessoa was at least moderately successful. Clearly, it was never likely that I was going to physically encounter someone who died in 1935, but his presence permeates Lisbon all the way from kitschy tee shirts with his image and that of three of his heteronyms to tiles with his caricature and a few lines of poetry on them, to his statue outside A Brasileira in the Chiado, to the bed turned down in his former room awaiting his decision to nap--even though he's been sleeping in the family mausoleum for 76 years--if you don't believe in reincarnation--under the less than benevolent scrutiny of his grandmother. In the best case scenario, he was reincarnated rapidly, and escaped being nagged ad nauseum.


More than his image, Pessoa's presence is omnipresent in the atmosphere of Lisbon. Its timid and antiquated marginality mirrors his own on a larger--but not grander--scale, and the pervasive "saudades" of its people are a permanent presence--like that of a fly in amber. It was inpossible for me to walk up and down the streets--whether following part of the itinerary of Pessoa's tourist guide from 1926, or moving along the melancholic references to streets in The Book of Disquiet--without finding it easier to walk in his imagined footprints than to avoid them.


It is also close to impossible, when pursuing Pessoa, not to have one's footsteps tap out the lines of some of his poems.


Walking toward the docks through fog and light rain on a Sunday, when the streets are practically deserted, since most shops close from 1 p.m. on Saturday until Monday morning, there are no visible landmarks. Suddenly, the sun seeps through the clouds and you see you have crossed the Praça do Comercio, and are now being swept into the river by virtue of your iinattention and your daydreams:


"My dreams are a stupid refuge,
like an umbrella against a bolt of lightning."
(Paginas Escogida, p. 58, Pessoa under his own name)


It's easy, in Lisbon, to enter Pessoa's timeless dream state, to become part of his hallucinations or your own--or even those of a stranger. When the gypsy woman in Tabucchi's novel, REQUIEM, after selling the narrator (Paul) two fake Lacoste polo shirts and four genuine alligators to stick onto them, begins to read his palm, she tells him that he is living a hallucination and that by just touching his hand she feels that she has become part of it, we sense that just by reading the novel (or by watching Alain Tanner's faithful film version) that we have also become part of it, and that we are in for a slow (it is a Requirm, after all) but bumpy ride of our own if we attempt to sort out the real from the imagined, the living from the dead. And although Paul has from mid-day to midnight to make his own peace with the dead, it needs to be noted that in Lisbon most of the clocks don't keep time, and even though a stopped clock tells the correct time twice every 24 hours, there is a pervasive lethargy and free-floating anxiety that indicates that you yourself may well float free of the string and miss connecting with one or both of those moments.


Absent reliable clocks, there is no past and no future--only an uncertain present--as we are habituated to measuring our experiences:


"But I don't want the present, I want reality;
I want the things that exist, not the time that measures them."
(p. 120, Pessoa's heteronym Alberto Caeiro)


In short, the present is just as unreal as the past and future. So there we are, stuck in a quicksand present which cannot reliably be said to exist, with our "saudades" of a past that may or may not have existed, looking to put it all into linear alignment with what the late Mexican writer Elena Garro called "Memories of the Future".


Walk down any street in Lisbon, especially on a Sunday--when you may be the only person you see--and then only because you are peering through the windows of darkened shops--and it could be any day of any year: there could be Portugese troops camped outside the castle waiting for enough arabs to die of starvation that they finally surrender after the siege of 5 months (arbitrarily, we'll say it's 1147 a.d.); there could be Phoenician ships arriving to found a settlement (around 1200 b.c., although some folks say that Lisbon was founded by Ulysses on his circuitous journey back to Penelope after the Trojan War); or perhaps Julius Caesar has just been appointed governor--with schemes to make the city great in his own image for his climb to the top of Rome's political heap (60 b.c.); perhaps Vasco da Gama is just now setting out for India (1497); or instead of the dilapidated building across from my window, the extravagant offices and dungeons of the Inquisition are having their heyday (16th century, probably); or in place of this sleepy Sunday it's the morning of All Saints Day, 1755, and in a few minutes the city will be reduced to ruins by an earthquake--which Voltaire claimed signified the existence of Evil on earth and the impotent weakness of our species.


Ultimately, it doesn't matter which day of which year it is. You are going to spend the day walking around Lisbon, hoping to connect with Pessoa on some level and shake some answers out of him--at least to your most pressing question: If life is a hallucination, what is death?


In my own hallucination, which appears to be shared by others, I am no longer in Lisbon, but back in Mexico, and I am watching Alain Tanner's REQUIEM with my nephew Max. Isabel has just arrived at the Casa do Alentejo to meet up with Paul, who wants answers from her as well (Was he or Pierre the father of her aborted child, did Pierre convince her to have an abortion, why did she kill herself?) We do not hear his questions, nor her answers; we watch them dancing to a Fado in the balltoom. Then we see Paul sitting alone on a straight chair against the wall, and the camera shifts its point of view to his to show us Isabel continuing to dance the same Fado with Pierre, and then the two of them wave good-bye.


But, before the image fades to black, I feel myself sitting on the chair--not Paul--with my own unanswered questions, my own "saudades" for a past that cannot be recovered because if it did exist outside of my dream, it is floating somewhere in the future.


To have a biography, then, entails the creation of an arbitrary invention--the same as the biographies that Pessoa constructed for his heteronyms, and only as real--or unreal--as theirs:


"If, after I die, they want to write my biogtaphy,
nothing is more simple.
It has only two dates--that of my birth and that of my death.
Between the one and the other all the days are mine."
(p. 124, Alberto Caeiro)


Note that there is no past tense in that quote....


The pursuit of Pessoa, then, is the pursuit of the mystery of our own elusive past, present and future--the search for the key to unlock the door that lets us out of this hallucination that is either life, or death, or both at the same time--or neither, as who's to say that our biographies are not simply the inventions of a poet who wanted to squeeze more life and death and poetry into his own experience?


It's possible in REQUIEM that Paul misunderstood the message of the gypsy woman outside the Prazeres Cemetery when she told him that he could not escape his destiny and that he had an appintment with someone inside. It's possible she was referring to Pessoa, whose family tomb is not all that far away from the niche of Paul's friend Pierre. Or it may be that the hallucinatory pursuit of Pessoa, and the midnight "literary" supper with him, is a fog thrown up by his unconscious (which, when he converses on a park bench with the figure of the lottery ticket seller from Pessoa's BOOK OF DISQUIET , he claims is different from his soul and that the unconscious is a sickness, like a virus which one catches) to cover the real agenda: the opening, treating and closing of an unattended and unhealed wound.


One unhealed wound which figured in my trip to Lisbon uner the cover of pursuing a poet whose physical death began on my birthday 9 years before I was born is a wound that most people who live in my hemisphere, ironically called The New World, prefer to leave alone as an ugly unattended scar rather than open the wound and clean out their part in the infection still producing crimes against our humanity: the wound of conquest and colonialism.


Lisbon was the center of a widespread, if minor, colonial empire--for most Portugese that was its 15 minutes of fame for which they have "saudades". When a taxi driver took me up the back way to St. George's Castle, he commented that the route was through a barrio of poor immigrants. "Those poor immigrants are the result of colonialism", I said.


The process of genocide carried out by The West in the name of civilization (sic) was nothing more than a thundering herd of white barbarians out to slaughter all non-whites in the pursuit of gold, silver, tin, ivory, cinnamon and anything else of value they could grab in the process. Now the survivors of Portugal's colonialism are here in Lisbon from Goa, from San Tome, from Cabo Verde, from Guinea, from Angola, from Mozambique and others in search of a small slice of the riches that were taken from them and squandered a long rime ago (or today, or tomorrow).


Lisbon, along with the rest of the European capitals, is wringing its hands at the very possible collapse of the Eurozone. What else should they expect: They tried to create the structure of a colonial empire, with the colonies' provision of resources to the metropolis, but without any colonies! In a closed system, with no influx of riches to generate profits, all that is created and circulated is debt, which is sold so many times over that it becomes unpayable--and is worthless, anyway!


So, Europe has "saudades" for colonialism, and has been trying to do the impossible: eliminate all those non-white faces from its former colonies who are asking for jobs and handouts in their streets without replicating their crimes of genocide on their home turf.


If there is such a thing as a global body, to achieve homeostasis in a condition of grave imbalance due to inequality of wealth, one of two things will have to occur: Everyone will have to become rich (desperately unlikely, given that no one wants to open that denied ugly wound and clean it out so that it can humanity, even with terminal gangrene in the offing) or everyone will have to become poor (looking ever more likely in a city whose clocks have stopped ticking away the time).


Why choose Portugal, a minor player in the global grab-bag, to pick at my part of the wound? My unconscious probably had a hand in it, and the literary and cinematic tradion slowly being formed of chasing around Lisbon after a phantom named Fernando Pessoa (among others) has a decadent attraction. And since Lisbon is a city with very little "dynamism" and few if any reliable clocks, one can go at whatever pace one chooses--and on foot, by taxi, by tram, by funicular, by metro--or by climbing to the top of one of the seven hills and pulling one's cape over one's head, in the words of Pessoa (in English in the original) "like a raised wing". (p. 66)