One Art...

"The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like a disaster."

Elizabeth Bishop...

Retrato

"Eu não tinha este rosto de hoje,
assim calmo, assim triste, assim magro,
nem estes olhos tão vazios
nem o lábio amargo.

Eu não tinha estas mãos sem força,
tão paradas e frias e mortas;
eu não tinha este coração
que nem se mostra.

Eu não dei por esta mudança,
tão simples, tão certa, tão fácil:
– Em que espelho ficou perdida
a minha face?"

Cecília Meireles...

A Boy's Prayer Of Stones

By Rodney DeCroo

"I try to remember the small boy I once was.
There’s evidence that he existed:
photographs, home movies, my mother’s
stories. But I can’t lay claim to even a single
authentic memory. So what does one do

at 3 a.m., full of self pity as the body
goes to shit, potbellied, root canal
toothache, sore foot, bad knee, bad back,
lonelier than hell, and worst of all,
unable to remember who I once was.

I can’t be that boy again. I imagine
he turns away from me as from a stranger,
the unknown adult as much a puzzle
to the boy as the boy is to the man,
and neither of us certain of anything.

But the boy is sunlight and water,
the darting tumble of a sparrow’s flight,
and moves through the day with a grace
courtesy of the garden though the man
has learned forbidden apples wait everywhere.

Sunlight is never more or less than sunlight,
wind never more or less than wind,
rain is rain, and the moon is always there.
Only a boy with his scraped knees
and dirty fingernails can know these things

and have a love for them as abiding
and constant as the stones he gathers
and places beneath his bed or on window sills,
small prayers he offers to the presence
that walks beside him wherever he goes

and is both the world that contains him
and he himself and all he encounters.
The years still distant when the stranger
he will become will struggle and fail
to know these things and to remember him."

From Allegheny, released 25 February 2012.

post dedicado à Aline Siqueira...