António Manuel Pires Cabral

It is said they come from Central Europe. I see them coming
from the direction of Grijó, in a weary caravan.
...

Back then our town
would be visited by prostitutes -
our only recourse,
...

Not all insects will make it to November.
In December hardly any wings will be seen
attempting their resigned, late-season
flaps that go nowhere, though the curtains
may yet harbor some survivor
less exposed to the weather. And January
will retain almost no memory of the tiny life
deposited somewhere by diligent females
and tenaciously resistant to the calendar.

I, meanwhile, will have resisted the cold
and perhaps scoffed at the transitory death
of so many humble bodies
gone downriver.

But when May finally beats its drum
or blows its horn,
the shriveled wings will unwrinkle,
the sky will be small, the flowers scarce.
And the vile insects will triumph
over the ice and over me,
my afflictions.

What's the difference between
sixty years and one year?
What difference between a week
and one day?

Unless it's that no insect suffers
the agony of winter, whereas I fiddle
with these words of exorcism,
these laborious dialectics,
and I don't hide my face, since I can't
hide my face, from the vicious
countenance of the long harsh winter
that will seize me by way of the insects.
...

That creature that affronted the dawn
with its acidic, assiduous voice.
That had spurs for its bayonet
and seethed with red envy.

The rooster. One of its bones
still lying in the yard.
...

Here lies a computer
in the trash. And yet
its tin brain contained memory
- gigabytes of it! -, performed
the four mathematical operations
and accepted verses
on its immaculate
virtual whiteness.

Now it can no longer add
or subtract,
nor groan out poems, nor underline
misspelled words.
The droplets of solder, precarious
metal neurons,
have lost their memory.

Tell me, brother,
since you got there first,
what it's like not to function.

And if the rust is painful.
...

1.

But if in these six and a half decades
I was capable of some sort of flight

- which could only have been comparable
to the awkward and rudimentary flight
of chickens, with a great expenditure
of energy to achieve brief and desperate
moments of scant ascension,
but a kind of flying all the same,
by which I managed to stay aloft
in my lighter moments -

now, that cycle of flight having ended,
I must perch, the way birds do.

This isn't like when a shop
changes its line of business
or closes to take inventory
at year's end.
Nor is it like carrying out
an arrest warrant
or atoning for the disorderliness
of being a pedestrian who flew.
Nor is it the inevitable conclusion
to an act of sedition.

Perching, that's all. Returning
to the endearing things of earth.
It's the earth finally claiming what I owe her
and my claiming what she owes me
since my very first hour.

I flew, I'm flown out.
Without nostalgia.

2.

I choose the branch
most suited to my condition and alight
from my flight, perching like a bird
whose flying temporarily peters out.

And just as a perched bird, right
after alighting, still flaps its wings
two or three times,
so I flap mine.

But whereas the bird flaps its wings
to shake off the residue
of its flight,
I flap mine to keep my balance;
the branch bends, I'm not as agile
as I used to be, and I'd fall
if I didn't flap my wings.

Which is to say: I flap my wings the way
the tight-rope walker probes with his rod
and the blind man with his cane.

To feel more comfortable
outside my flight.

3.

And my perching, unlike the bird's,
is not a temporary state. From now on
I'll observe the march of my days
from my definitively perched perspective.

So here I am, perched, trying to accommodate
my body to this new condition.

My eyes look up at the space
from where I banished myself
to see if perchance I scratched
the crystal of air with my flight,
since even the tiniest scratch would cause
the crystal to cease being crystal.

I scratched nothing.
Thanks be to God.
After all that clumsy flying
I leave the air as clear and whole
as I found it.

(It's no wonder. I was always careful to shake
the dust from my feet before rising in flight.)

4.

No, it's not out of nostalgia
that in this terminal hour of perching I remember
the deft but imprudent, and impudent, forays
of my flight and how I seized the light.

It's out of gratitude, I suppose.

Flying was always the most useful
of my useless occupations.
A sprig of hay in the corner of my mouth.
A charitable donation to the flesh.
The orifice through which
torrents drained.

Intensely perched,
this is what I remember.
...