Audacious

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.