A Portuguese Goodbye

by Alexandre O’Neill*

Translated by Tatiana Faia

In your highly dangerous eyes
the most rigorous love is still in vigour
the pure light of the shoulders and the shadow
of an already purified anguish

No you could not have stayed with me tied
to the wheel in which I am rotting
in which we are rotting
tied to this paw tainted with blood this paw that falters
that almost meditates
and moves forth bellowing through the tunnel
of an ancient pain

You could not have stayed in this chair
where I spend my bureaucratic day
in company of that day-by-day misery
that ascends to the eyes gets to the hands
to the smiles
to the wrongly spelled love
to stupidity to the mouthless despair
to fear in profile
to the sleepwalking joy to the maniac comma
of this functionary way of living

You could not have stayed with me in this house
in mortal transit till that sordid
canine
policing day
until that day that does not spring from the most pure
promise of dawn
but from the misery of a night engendered
by an all-alike day

You could not have stayed with me tied
to this small pain that each one of us
carries gently by the hand
this small pain Portuguese style
so meek almost vegetal

Why you do not deserve this city you do not deserve
this wheel of nausea in which we spin
till idiocy
this small death
and its thorough and dirty ritual
this absurd reason of our own for being

No you belong to the adventurous city
to the city where love finds its streets
and the burning graveyard
of its death
you belong to the city where you live by a tread
of pure chance
where you die or live not of asphyxiation
but by the hands of an adventure of a pure trade
free from the false coin of good and evil

In this curve so tender and so piercing
which is going to be which already is your disappearing
I say goodbye
and like an adolescent
I stumble out of tenderness
for you

*From the book No Reino da Dinamarca [In the Kingdom of Denmark] (1958).

O original aparece clickando na etiqueta.