THE COFFEE-MILL Poem by Vasco Graça Moura

the coffee-mill shows up in various
cubist paintings, along with the bottle, the
newspaper and the pipe, all in
browns and grays, reality

in its vital edges, the somber
presence of reduced
hallucinations. the coffee-mill
turned everything into a finely ground

powder that clogged the most intimate mechanisms,
those of passion and grief, as well as the linear
calligraphies of fragmented profiles and cobalt-blue birds.
next the coffee-mill ground up representation,

which became unintelligible and gave
way to a music of spirals
with less spin, to a memory
less sharply defined, to contours

less indebted to cézanne, to a life
less still - yes, perhaps to a life
that was ready for the disorder
of another nature, another kind of life.

the coffee-mill became a barrel-organ.
the world speeded up,
people's lives became less linear,
and the clear waters turned cloudy.