I
Seat eleven, fasten your belts
The five senses on board:
Off I go, wide world
On the not-always-bright journey
For freedom’s sake
Kisses, father. Kisses, mother
The bus wheels long to move
Brasília’s one great theater
But I want to meet the writers
To watch the artists rehearse
II
Who’s directing this play?
I’m ready for the expedition
So many other Brazils await
My tender gaze.
In our Portuguese fit so many
Portugueses, and tongues
Indigenous, Black, and mixed
I go south through the Americas,
Tracing our ancestors’ steps
No one will tell me “yes”
III
Then I’ll be the one to say “no”
When anyone steps on another’s dream
The Republic of Students was founded
Let the news run round the world
Till no doubt’s left
Begin the countdown:
The small world of naïve ideas
Born of serious play will draw
Verses across the lands of cities
Hungry for our song
IV
And because it was impossible
Those old young madmen went
to see through the truth
Even if just for a heartbeat
Even if from high walls
We seem so small
It’s still possible to plant
The seed of a dream
Hidden amid the noise
Unnoticed, childlike and follow it
As it grows
V
Even from afar giving
Shade and sweet fruit
Still the weeping of undoing
The regrowth beyond
Nothing stronger than will than need
which insistently
must find its natural bed again
Meanwhile, I’ll unlearn
that America
of movies and freedom myths
VI
Will I recognize its deep root?
What magic portions does it brew?
America, what kind of woman are you
who looks at me with hypnotic eyes?
I have no money
Only quick hands and rhythm armed feet
What empire’s this, made of dollars?
My body’s made of coffee, berimbau, and poems of
Leminski, Quintana, and Manoel de Barros
VII
Tim-Tom-Tim
“How are you doing?”
“Has it going?”
My northern brother smiles
Gold tooth, tearful eyes
America, woman of long arms
Take me to see the world
Now I can spell the Anglo-Saxon tongue
Let me see what you’ve planted
There in Africa, here in South America.
VIII
Further east, between Cairo
and Jerusalem—where even saints doubt—
What have you sown, America?
Crossing the high plains
Lake Titicaca is drying up
Too much carbon in the air?
We’re suffocating, America.
Car Culture’s electric now!
Remenber how beautiful is South America
of Andes, of Jungle, of Cerrado plains
IX
Here’s the New World
Where every people comes
with their tools and tricks
I invite you for a Café Tortoni
Then Lamas, in Flamengo
At night we’ll meet in Brasília, at Beirute
There’s salsa tonight in Bogotá
and later Ayahuasca to see más allá
Why did Jorge Luis Borges return to Europe?
There’s still so much to learn of what is
X
To err through what isn’t
digging behind the blue tiles
of Lisbon, Sintra, Tomar
to find traces of Tartessos
In Lixbona, in Ulixibona
And from time immemorial
Recognize the ancestry of the new
Return to the homeland
With so much to say
so much to tell of the world
Yet find no eager ears
XI
The dry-pepper gaze
Of a friend, dream companion
Return with transformed eyes
to see what must be changed
Ostracism, a bitter seed
Grew in my yard
I’ll water it to florish solitude
Then I’ll take it wherever I go
There’s still so much to (trans)form—
A flight of blue birds
XII
They take me to Copacabana
Where the Tupinambá people once taught me
To replant joy
Between sea and mountain
on that narrow strip of land
to plant smiles and celebrate,
to drink the cool water of hope,
that tastes like beachside mate with lemon,
so green, almost blue,
like the waters of Ipanema.
XIII
Shall we return to the heart of Pachamama,
to read the world’s future in the Sacred Valley?
One day all will praise again
the Mother of these lands—
from the Sacred Valley to the headwaters of the Amazon,
resting in Machu Picchu,
the Emperor’s summer rooms.
To one side, the snow-crowned grandparents of the Andes;
to the other, the vast Amazon calling.
When will America awake?
XIV
Time to go home.
But where is home now?
So many doors opened and closed,
I no longer know where to land.
When every corner of the world is home,
I no longer know my father or my mother.
Our common dreams are lost.
I’ve become the prodigal son
returning to a familiar emptiness.
XV
Gather the shards, the rags, the marks—
I seek in myself who’s no longer there.
Return empty-handed
to set hands to work,
where silences illuminate.
Did Brasília stop in time?
Or was it the metamorphosis in me
that quickened my courage
to say what’s out of place?
“How dare you say that,
little traveler?”
XVI
Who do you think you are?
An Edgar Morin, copper-faced,
burnt by the tropical sun?
Philosopher or madman—
small miracles visit me.
I return to the Amazon
with trained eyes, soaked in poetry,
to trans-see the forest’s mysteries.
Little by little I became fluent
in what can be read
in nature’s silence.
XVII
I walk through Brasília like the last
survivor of a dreamed South America.
I’ve glimpsed the New World
and walk among its wreckage.
I work here and there—
a researcher of traces and remains,
wrecks and rubble no one wants.
I dare to be a specialist in error,
in crisis, in disconnection, in lack—
until, in the middle of nothing, I find—
XVIII
—the loose end of the tangled thread.
Maybe a test of nine would’ve solved it—
ojalá!—our lack of dreams.
I think I have a knack
for crafting futures,
for sketching better worlds—
if only I could arrange it with the Russians.
I need someone to walk beside me
on this troubled path,
which, in science, has a fancy name.
XIX
Now I’m an interdisciplinary thinker,
hold a chair at the Academy of Uncertainty.
I’m that son-of-a-bitch
who looks where nothing is—
what’s missing in learned secular science.
Einstein left us that pearl—
I dare to patch and relativize.
The road’s been lighter
since I began to Spinozize
with the natural powers that cross through me.
In Baruch I found
a defender of clumsy grace.
Audacity may be
another name for freedom.
XX
Or you may call it happiness.
I find myself exiled
near the Equator Line—
in Natal, laying my sorrows to dry
while my joys flutter,
carried by the Alísios winds.
There’s nowhere left to return to.
The Earth is my home.
Its story is my story.
This Christmas, I’ll revisit Brasília—
as if for the very first time.
