Saltar para: Posts [1], Pesquisa [2]

luís soares

Blog do escritor Luís Soares

Mark Strand - From The Long Sad Party

Someone was saying
something about shadows covering the field, about
how things pass, how one sleeps towards morning
and the morning goes.

Someone was saying
how the wind dies down but comes back,
how shells are the coffins of wind
but the weather continues.

It was a long night
and someone said something about the moon shedding its white
on the cold field, that there was nothing ahead
but more of the same.

Someone mentioned
a city she had been in before the war, a room with two candles
against a wall, someone dancing, someone watching.
We began to believe

the night would not end.
Someone was saying the music was over and no one had noticed.
Then someone said something about the planets, about the stars,
how small they were, how far away.

Mark Strand - Sleeping with One Eye Open

Unmoved by what the wind does,
The windows
Are not rattled, nor do the various
Areas Of the house make their usual racket–
Creak at
The joints, trusses, and studs.
They are still. And the maples,
At times to raise havoc,
Evoke Not a sound from their branches
It’s my night to be rattled,
With spooks. Even the half-moon
Half half dark), on the horizon,
Lies on
Its side casting a fishy light
Which alights
On my Floor, lavishly lording
Its morbid
Look over me. Oh I feel dead,
Away in my blankets for good, and
My room is clammy and cold,
Moonhandled And weird. The shivers
Wash over
Me, shaking my bones, my loose ends
And I lie sleeping with one eye open,
That nothing, nothing will happen

Mark Strand - Provisional Eternity

A man and a woman lay in bed. “Just one more time,” said the man, “just one more time.” “Why do you keep saying that?” said the woman. “Because I never want it to end,” said the man. “What don’t you want to end?” said the woman. “This,” said the man, “this never wanting it to end.”

Mark Strand - Coming To This

We have done what we wanted.
We have discarded dreams, preferring the heavy industry
of each other, and we have welcomed grief
and called ruin the impossible habit to break.


And now we are here.
The dinner is ready and we cannot eat.
The meat sits in the white lake of its dish.
The wine waits.


Coming to this
We have no heart or saving grace,
no place to go, no reason to remain.

Mark Strand - Black Maps

Not the attendance of stones,
nor the applauding wind,
shall let you know
you have arrived,


not the sea that celebrates
only departures,
nor the mountains,
nor the dying cities.


Nothing will tell you
where you are.
Each moment is a place
you’ve never been.


You can walk
believing you cast
a light around you.
But how will you know?


The present is always dark.
Its maps are black,
rising from nothing,


in their slow ascent
into themselves,
their own voyage,
its emptiness,


the bleak, temperate
necessity of its completion.
As they rise into being
they are like breath.


And if they are studied at all
it is only to find,
too late, what you thought
were concerns of yours


do not exist.
Your house is not marked
on any of them,
nor are your friends,


waiting for you to appear,
nor are your enemies,
listing your faults.
Only you are there,


saying hello
to what you will be,
and the black grass
is holding up the black stars.

Mark Strand - The Remains

I empty my shoes and leave them beside the road.
At night I turn back the clocks;


I say my own name. I say goodbye.
The words follow each other downwind.
I love my wife but send her away.


My parents rise out of their thrones
into the milky rooms of clouds. How can I sing?
I empty myself of my life and my life remains.

Mark Strand - The Everyday Enchantment of Music


Mark Strand - Storm

On the last night of our house arrest

a howling wind tore through the streets,

ripping down shutters, scattering roof tiles,

leaving behind a river of refuse. When the sun

rose over the marble gate, I could see the guards,

sluggish in the morning heat, desert their posts

and stagger toward the woods just out of town.

“Darling,” I said, “let’s go, the guards have left,

the place is a ruin.” But she was oblivious.

“You go,” she said, and she pulled up the sheet

to cover her eyes. I ran downstairs and called

for my horse. “To the sea,” I whispered, and off

we went and how quick we were, my horse and I,

riding over the fresh green fields, as if to our freedom.

Mark Strand - Reading In Place

Imagine a poem that starts with a couple
Looking into a valley, seeing their house, the lawn
Out back with its wooden chairs, its shady patches of green,
Its wooden fence, and beyond the fence the rippled silver sheen
Of the local pond, its far side a tangle of sumac, crimson
In the fading light. Now imagine somebody reading the poem
And thinking, "I never guessed it would be like this,"
Then slipping it into the back of a book while the oblivious
Couple, feeling nothing is lost, not even the white
Streak of a flicker's tail that catches their eye, nor the slight
Toss of leaves in the wind, shift their gaze to the wooden dome
of a nearby hill where the violet spread of dusk begins.
But the reader, out for a stroll in the autumn night, with all
The imprisoned sounds of nature dying around him, forgets
Not only the poem, but where he is, and thinks instead
Of a bleak Venetian mirror that hangs in a hall
By a curving stair, and how the stars in the sky's black glass
Sink down and the sea heaves them ashore like foam.
So much is adrift in the ever-opening rooms of elsewhere,
He cannot remember whose house it was, or when he was there.
Now imagine he sits years later under a lamp
And pulls a book from the shelf; the poem drops
To his lap. The couple are crossing a field
On their way home, still feeling that nothing is lost,
That they will continue to live harm-free, sealed
In the twilight's amber weather. But how will the reader know,
Especially now that he puts the poem, without looking,
Back in the book, the book where the poet stares at the sky
And says to a blank page, "Where, where in Heaven am I?"

Mark Strand - The End

Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,
When he’s held by the sea’s roar, motionless, there at the end,
Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he’ll never go back.


No longer appear, not every man knows what he’ll discover instead.


Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus