ALICE Poem by Margarida Vale de Gato

Heart-hammer, coffin-nails, passion-swindle.
Shakespeare died on an old calendar in April
wrote "these violent delights have violent ends"
and declared romantic love deceased with a quill.
Since then many lovers have become case studies
in western research centers piles of men and women
are grabbed by the nape devouring each other and the dark
- they can hardly be identified in the fluorine of headlights,
on screens, in office waiting rooms and hotels -
silent blue collars sweep us away, tidying things up
at dawn, those whose dreams are more meager than salaries.

From you I hope for what does not occur to you to ask,
to you I must point out this world full of errors.
The world is full. Of the dead who never
drop dead. The world is full of the dead living
with little thirst. The world is full of kids
who slide for two days through solid sleep resuscitated
on the third without redemption, without anyone checking
their pulse or what they took, or was given them in excess.
I ask your forgiveness and understanding for the many deceptions
the garrote of maturity won't staunch, you'll find out

one day what is so overwhelming to confront. The world is full
of adults without detachable answer keys they stagger
on top of waves over long tectonic faults, the world
is full of the apathetic convulsing domestic quakes
torpedoes in picturesque rest houses villas swept
off the map where there were once squares pools sodas and Sunday
matinees, there were intersections and corners and white
upturned wandering eyes. The world is full of wires
great migrations to worse places inoculated
with molds that won't heal but burst the indices
of scholarly publications, one day you will live where

you shall sway - so that I hope you'll accidentally find
alternatives. The world is full of rebels who are
ambivalent and meek unrolling black rolls
of linoleum where nothing can be read, they use them
to cover bellicose mines of all the parents' wars, patiently reject
millenarian dowries of folly and decide that what's left
is to draw gestures of dance against the precarious underpinning
of having a floor on which to fall. From you I hope for justice, loyalty
and an innocence of fear and resistance if possible
to theories of conspiracy as well as the entire imagination
of others, the distraction that trains the tourist in courage.

There's enough magical thinking, Alice, which you'll discover
as well: that your existence was born in part
of a meeting of intensities; of there having been absolutes
and afflictions, settlings of collisions, replayed promises, shames
re-acknowledged, interrupted correspondences, offenses
of affectionate detail. I expect nothing less of you, not to mention
everything else: that sense of humor which hits the mark and disregards
the chill of indifference, the forgetfulness that upon us bestows
the dazzlement of successive aspects without any previous
memory, solicitude, curiosity, the filter
of love if possible sweet minimally diluted.