610 – before bach & other fragments (poetry)

Tree by the brook, Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, c. 1831

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João-Maria

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TRANSCRIPT

610

Before Bach 
   there was time, 
   and smiles
   and white roses. 

Heaven was 
   a downed architecture,
   and god was an asthma
   whispering by
   in Phrygian tombs. 

The sky was
   shaped like a serpent
   and at night
   everything coiled
   in tiny iridescent drops. 

noise flitted
  to where the world wasn’t,
even before the world became
  the noise left behind. 

611

I place things 
 (to place things) (to give them place)
and I name the places 
 (to name places) (to give them name)
and I lose things
 (how could I have done this?) 
and I forget names
 (every end is glass
  migrating around the flesh
  of one’s arms and hands
  foraging the nightmares) 
(to regret)

612

Summer wood chortles
tense like a drunken dawn.
A city can be a glorious place.
The morning can be beautiful
and soak the skin with milky foam.

The hand finally comes, indomitable,
to cradle you while the gulls dance.
You are fed, you feed. It is so,
to spill and to emerge, it is so…

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