Murilo Mendes
translated by Chris Daniels

Chaos’s Window

1

Everything happens
In an Egypt of aerial corridors.
Wait in a lampless
Gallery for Someone
To scrape the ’cello
—Or your heart?
Blue of war

2

Embroglios phone in,
Laments phone in,
Useless meetings,
Yawns and remorses.
Ah! Somebody call consolation,
The pure dew and
The crystal carriage.

3

You’ve never carried
Pianos or stones,
But in your soul
—Nobody recalls,
But ancestral beaches heard—
The piano carriers’ chant goes on,
The stone carriers’ chant goes on.

4

The sky falls out of doves.
Echos of a band fly
Away from the foundlings’ home.
You’ll never be an ancestor
Because you had no children:
You’ll always be the poets’ future.
In the distance the diminished sea
Billows innocently.

5

Terror’s harmony
When the soul destroys pardon
And the cycle of flowers closes
In particular and general:
No flute-sound,
Not even a Greek temple
On a blue hill
Would decide the recuperative act.
Hunger, littoral without choruses,
Death’s hard birth.
Earth opens bloody,
Abandons white Abel,
Hidden from God.

6

Childhood comes from eternity.
Then, only magnificent death
—Gag and muzzle’s destruction:
And maybe you already glimpsed it
Playing with your top
Or dismounting your beetle.
Balanced between two eternities,
Astonishing hunger
For love and music:
Raw sweetness,
The last free passage.
We only see heaven from behind.

7

This desire for obscurity
falls from the pyramid’s shadows.
Enigma, innocence, barbaric,
Birds galloping the elements.
Equestrine clouds
Burst in the deep sky.
Where is justice’s communicant arms,
Where are her paratroopers?
Cuirassed forms watch over
The sabotage of harps.

8

What are they all waiting for?
The wind of nocturnal crimes
Destroys august harvests.
Harsh wild waters
Fertilize cemeteries.
Mothers pour
The ghosts of another war
From their bellies.
No sign of alliance
Over the annihilated table.
Purple waves,
Rise out of man.

9

Soul’s crest,
Ancient future tradition:
If the soul has no crest
Can it resist the Destroyer?

10

Velocity opposes
Essential nudity.
To deserve the breaking of Seals
You’ll weave your crown of thorns,
Or you’ll be left lying around,
All alone, with the corpses of your books.

11

Pendulum marking
Disillusion and solitude,
Give up your place to the pipes of the sovereign
Organ surpassing time:
Humanity’s pulsation
Has sought between boredom and tears,
From beginning to end,
With its miserable flesh,
Among bloody necklaces,
Between uncertainty and abyss,
Fatigue and pleasure.
Eternal peace and delight.
Beyond ocean, beyond air,
From beginning to end,
Beyond combat,
Rocking cradles,
Serene mixed choruses
Out of deep hope and white harmonies
Go rising.

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