"YES, I WAS A PROPHET" Poem by Nuno Júdice

I experience contact with shades,
nausea from the effervescence of ruins, of the leaves
that take the virgin form of a trunk. I'm already a habit,
inhabited by different spiritual directions, heard at the bottom of human
wells: a tone of voice that multiplies the anxious contradiction
of nostalgias. I was told:

"Seek the first degree of happiness in the chorus
of the dead, a final howl of suffering in the obsessiveness
of oystermen . . . ", and the words came to me
in a tumult, in heavy breaths, in a death rattle

of the aged. And I saw the end: the spiraling fall of the stars, the face
of a blue ice, the sound of waves drowning out the image
of a belly rent to the entrails. No exorcism could restore
my strength. I entered the procession of the sleepwalkers,
uniting my voice to the common lament. "Who is this?"
"The taciturn poet, the ancient bearer of absolution."
And they remarked:
"What good is he now? . . . " And the tide billowed
like the clouds at twilight! Among men there are some
who still remember: the drunk storyteller, the blind musician
of fairs, the mad fortuneteller. The children stone them
at the village gates. One of them appeared,one morning, floating
in the canal

and his eyes saw everything.