I
I had a time of serene watercourses,
Of banks, backwaters, whirlpools,
Clear waterfalls,
The inner rivers of life belonged to childhood.
And there was a time of bridges, docks, harbors,
Of frontiers and customs,
Of imminent farewells.
Foreigner in myself, expatriate of the soul,
Behind the mountain I saw the horizon,
Behind the horizon other skies await me
And the immensity of the sea.
II
Atlantic Ocean, sea of a thousand waters,
oceanic greened crystal
current, salt and desolate foam
on the tanned skin of summer;
sea lions howling at seagulls
wounded by the sun of red clouds.
On that shore, south of the continent,
American margin of my life,
the long journey without return began
navigating without a map, without a compass, without a guide.
Guarujá, Guanabara
bays waiting for me
bays that keep me away from sleep and from fever.
III
Equatorial Atlantic, African beach,
Crabs escape the shore.
Sunset, insects and kettle drums;
my body sank into the water
still and black
to wash
the shadow of another body;
remains of dead clams and trash.
That African water—
I do not know what the name was—
between arms of the river,
trails lining the green waist
in the mangroves of Catió,
with palm grove and saltine rice-fields
of tumultuous quagmires, mud-lands.
Once the water was rich:
gray crocodiles, toucan and redfish,
shrieks of crazed birds,
the monkeys shout and amaze
in the white flight of pelicans
gilded by sunset, they conceal
the copper disc of the sun,
the night imposes herself
vertically brutal
as the last serpents
scurry through tidal pools.
In the canoe, the cant,
the bodies, muscles,
hidden smile in a sombrero-brim:
crescent, crescent,
under the papaya tree.
IV
Boreal Atlantic, black sands,
volcano, lava, basalt, fumaroles,
frozen subaquatic transparencies,
in the distance slow black spermwhales
inseminate peace on the horizon,
skimmed by the enigmatic, chattering shearwaters
glimpsed during nocturnal dialogues,
the shearwaters chatter
in the language of drunken birds.
Catapulted in the mid ocean,
green islands of magma awe,
meeting place for homeless people
Sailors step into the legend,
always passing in search of tides held
anchored, roped, pitched
in gin and tonic
and in whale soup.
V
Sea of Mare Nostrum,
Mediterranean Sea,
Sea not mine and sea
of so many others,
Biblical sea and sea of many names
Mythical sea of lands and wars,
Sea of chaos,
Confounding of old tongues,
Sea of Jesus, Jonah and Odysseus,
Sea of this life, boat of life,
Life is the sea and a boat adrift,
Is Ionian and Aegean,
Adriatic and Tyrrhenian,
Heroic water of Hercules and Aeneas
And now the sea of tears and shame,
Of floating coffins in the fog: Sea of ignominy,
sea of illicit wanderings,
Sea of merchants of bodies and of weapons.
VI
Sea of Java, sea anemones,
fluorescent corals, other islands,
another necklace of green emeralds.
The early morning boat glides
its fixed course towards the smoky mountain,
it involves burning,
Crackle, Krakatoa,
erupting in ashen rain
upon the gray
of burnt and calcinated tree stumps,
Smoky stone, trees without birds.
Krakatoa child,
son of mother Krakatoa,
submerged in the sea,
name of noise.
It was the storm and it was ship coming unmoored,
like a wet and cold deathbed,
like the sinister hiss of the wind,
as the ultimate redemption of fire.
VII
I walked the shores of the Baltic
in the silence of the cold
white sand beaches,
the snow on the fjord,
loneliness and winter sun,
meditation, the music of the wind,
night-sagas,
sleepless dreams.
VIII
Golden Horn
bright is the Bosphorus,
trembling minaret
under a bridge,
the shrill cry of the fishermen.
Port of my maternal ancestors
I recognized the faces,
voices,
colors, songs,
aromas,
I fore-felt the gazes,
touched mysterious gifts,
fugitive hands, caresses.
They do not leave me, they are the memories
of something that was not,
a possible and improbable past,
borrowed fantasy, inherited
memory of myths and stories.
IX
My face: I made it wet
once, upon the Pacific,
a neglected coast of Japan—
typhoons and radioactive mist—
They say, that to touch the water,
to moisten the lips
in saltpeter,
omens a voyage of return.
So be it.
X
Bold great grandmother, Jewish,
challenged the Arabian Sea
and Basora gave her our toponym:
Basraubi bequeathed us a surname
of strange sounds. Their people
abandoned in the mountain passes,
with children in tow
crossing seas, continents,
defying the barriers of time,
to reinvent their lineage
at the other end of the world,
determined to live and endure,
abolishing nostalgia
and the pain of what was lost.
XI
Great grandmother, clean blooded,
un-Jewish:
Catholic of race and of conscience,
bathed in the Bay of Biscay,
she embarked on her long journey toward the future
origin and cradle of my people.
She resisted the tidal waves, the wars, hunger,
fermented character in her people,
as in bread,
she shaped them, oven-fed them baked them
in the temperance and fury of her race,
exalted her clamor for independence,
she kept traveling,
then settled on the earth,
and inserted her blood, admixtured
into the blood of others,
making us free-spirited,
vigorous, strong.
XII
Between the East River and the Hudson
I climbed bridges, I walked trails,
I hung myself on rusty rails,
I made my own parks, squares, skyscrapers
of the rotten and tasty
apple proclaimed.
Cosmopolitan water,
not mine, unlonged for,
margin of the world, uterus of races,
do not tempt me, do not despair,
You do not tie me up. Are you there,
seductive, bright, lavish
wrapped in magnificent tinsels. You scare me.
XIII
Oh North Sea,
you, the sea of my destiny,
here I shuffle my life every day
and here:
my daughters, they weave their designs.
Opaque water,
lashes of wind,
Foggy coasts,
bristling ice-borne wave,
dive in mud,
swim upstream,
to be reborn in cold
with the ardor of fire.
North Sea: I learned to love you,
for your menace and your difference,
to drown
cruel melancholy
in you,
to defeat
fear’s vortex
in you.
XIV
I have other seas,
other waters.
I do not know the frozen shores
from the remote Arctic and Antarctic,
I did not travel to the Caribbean or the Antilles;
the Caucasus or the Caspian
they are strange watery solitudes;
and the Barentz Sea,
of crazy adventurers—
Barentz shall have to wait for me in vain.
I crossed you from sun to sun,
father of all seas,
Hölderling archipelago,
your brave water
that unites us and separates us.
XV
What other cruel gods—
other than Nyads and Nereids,
what deceptive Sirens, Gorgons,
Jellyfish and newts,
What Spirits of Water and Storm,
will grant me the promised, submerged
Other Atlantis—
another mismatch.
Because as a young man I dreamt
with the Sargasso sea,
today Sargassos await me,
on the edge of the Styx,
in the bottomless pit of the Avernus,
Acheron, in a certain ending,
and Charon, the last boatman.
Against all odds
poetry frees those
waterlogged
breaks the shell
and dance
Prayer to the Ocean
Old sea
Father
Of life
Of nature
Of all that pulses,
all that breathes
Of all that perishes:
I salute you
Motherwater
The water said
Where are you running off to, so dryly
I said
I am running dry because of you,
Going off now
to dry away
without thirst
In the wetlands
The song complains
she told me
I do not understand
your black patter,
It is the language of Caribs
I said to her
My mother knew:
all the solitudes,
myriad desertions.
She sheltered
a humble silence
Motherwater
The water said
Where are you running off to, so dryly
I said
I am running dry because of you,
Going off now
to dry away
without thirst
In the wetlands
The song complains
she told me
I do not understand
your black patter,
It is the language of Caribs
I said to her
My mother knew:
all the solitudes,
myriad desertions.
She sheltered
a humble silence
Water memory
Flat stones, flagstone on flagstone,
Family tumulus, watchtower tower,
Cantabrian banks.
My ancestor peered into black ocean
The infinite horizon, mirror of other waters.
Just a memorial to random feats,
heroic promises,
feverish and improbable idea
of legend and of the future.
Distant banks, transparent arteries
Nourish the lying body of this earth,
They drag boulders,
Gems of the water that runs and runs and runs
I erect this tower, in a memory
of my not having returned to wash away my memory
In that river without ports, without ships, without sailors,
Distance that engulfs the banks of the dream.
Sailors
Peoples of the Water
unite their voices
in abeyance
of the wind in the sails
paddles high.
Smugglers of ideas
aleph and beta traffickers
explanators of rebel graphics
that record weights and measures
who write proclamations and decrees
that shape abstraction and thought
concealed
between barrels of salt and rice and spices
between swords and spears and plowshares
between pigments
of the mineral blue, the purple sea and the earthworm
between wine and oil amphorae
Among the expensive silks.
And the anxious hand that blurs
the zither, the abacus, the zinc and the rudder.
Without sea
Sea hits
wave violence
water wall
temporary
storm
hurricane eye
together
navigating the time
without sea.
Countryless
Infinite desolation
Immeasurable sadness
Disillusion
Multiplied shame
Faces
Crowded Bodies
Shapeless
Desperate wait
Ships without direction
Heading to no port
Unnamed port
Remoteness
No return.
Landfall
To land on the shores of oblivion
Of the ineffable oracle
Each syllable / phrase
Images
Fused in metaphors
And finally alone
Wandering / Runaways
to shape the space
to define the perimeter / horizon
The wings fluttered in embraces
Entangled legs
On the infinite geography
Sheet / Earth
Bed / grave
Rest on the word
Write in the water
Like the sailor
A message to the shipwrecked
Write in the air
As the rebel
To cheer the companions
Write in the sand
As the rabbi
To delete later
Before the apostle
Write to anyone
Be voice and message
Carriyng uphill
The own
Stone of silence
Exodus
From the other side of the water
They move,
They run away
From bullet, bomb, shrapnel,
From destruction, aggression, dispossession.
Carrying on their backs
Children, grandparents, fear.
On this side of the water
Disgust, shame, indignation,
Insecurity, lack of solidarity, indifference.
The water is nobody’s belonging,
but it is belongs to us even less.
For them it means
a raft without direction,
or the sea-bottom,
Rotten anonymous bodies.
The waters are of literary sailors,
Of intrepid cowards,
Of invented shipwrecks.
In the out-ends of the soul,
Float up the same embodied lie —
Merchants of hope,
Dreamers of nothing.
Water isolates us,
Unites us, separates us
In the illusion of the journey,
In the pain of the exodus.
Time passes,
Anonymous,
Adrift.
Many times
We earth,
Without compasses,
No maps,
And we arrived
To the deserted shores from nowhere,
Where no one waits for us.