from Lines for Álvaro de Campos

from Lines for Álvaro de Campos

from Lines for Álvaro de Campos

All night I have dreamt of tobacco,
of a world filled with smoke
and governed by tobacconists.
I work my way back to you
through generations of cigarettes
 
rollups, tailormades, filtered, unfiltered;
fat and thin, menthol and acrid;
some coloured and some with cards, pictures,
a world of dead stars and football players,
a world all lips and fingers
 
I light my way to a dark café,
the smoke from my own cigarette ending
in the smoke that billows above your head,
that is your life, inhaled then with a flourish
expelled, to entertain the air, to go nowhere.
 
Tobacco-haunted I wander
through rooms rank with the odour . . .
 
§
 
Lisbons of the mind: doleful skies, soul music,
ancient trams. And you, the unquiet engineer
of indefinite character, smoking life away
on the returning liner . . . 
The city is the estuary glimpsed again and again,
the streetlamps come on as you disembark,
their visitation a dreamed of fanfare.
 
§
 
As much profit to read
 
a tram ticket, a laundry bill,
Child Saved
By Portuguese Kidney
 
I have broken into your cabin
and taken you, monocle, black hair wide side parting,
student of naval engineering in Glasgow, childhood
in the Algarve
                        piratical odes
 
and nailed you to the mast.
Sharks of my own making poke their interested fins
through the water. There’s a plank lashed to the gunwale
where I have you stroll . . .
 
§
 
The light is cool and hard
and sharpens what it falls on.
The table, the chair,
look, are utterly here,
and someone’s hands
 
move swiftly for the water,
reach for the towel —
old rag, threadbare,
the sun hitting the same spot,
yesterday’s face printed there.
 
I raise my eyes to the mirror
and see the morning thicken,
the clear room retreat
as if a doubt had struck it,
as if it began to think
 
of all else it might be —
majestically arrayed,
the secretest place in the palace
of the hermit’s foolish shelter.
I light my cigarette
 
and we agree to differ,
we don’t argue whether
the blue clouds streaming
are the smoke writing the light
or the light come down to smoke.