UM POEMA DE CLAUDIO DANIEL

OCCIPITAL FLOWER

Occipital flower is the head’s name.

Lines, volumes.

A writing of bones, nerves,

orbs, memories.

Words that got lost in some place

that you avoid.

Stage scenery that suddenly emerges

like lakes, crystals,

small white

 knives.

A snake that is not the Name that runs on your

lips.

Tree that says neither more nor less

than

this.

Can madness be learnt?

You crush an insect between your fingers

but the sensation

remains.

It’s a shiver that you cannot explain.

Fibres, everything fibres of a miraculous cloth.

An oriental carpet

shaped like a kidney,

on which we are a minuscule detail,

ant riding on the back of a dragon.

On your palm, your pulse, your epidermis,

you thought you felt the games of the night,

fleeting hands, a stilled voice,

no board

or pawn.

This is not the face of a dream,

less light, no membrane,

fuck, you yell

at the breadcrumbs.

Nobody’s ants are crossing, from one side to the other,

the garden’s

flowerbed.

The illusion of love exists and the teeth, teeth, teeth.

Because everything is real.

The stone that explodes in your temples.

The Earth in the shape of a chalice.

The word that reproduces like the birds in the Palace

of the Moon Goddess.

The meaning is just the shadow.

I’m the hunger for a clarity that will never be.

Because the rhythms, the rhythms, the rhythms.

Because of the she-dog’s laughter.

Celan and the ‘lunatic-open pore’.

Now exit to anywhere.

Crabs adrift in the rain, a portrait, a name

that is not the snake

that does not run

on your lips.

Throwing yourself into the shadow searching for the meaning of chewing

copper leaves.

Throwing yourself into the shadow searching for the intimate beetle

tattooed on the pussy

of Lady Language.

Throwing yourself into the shadow because stone is more than yell

is more than squirrel

is more than the cloudy

howl

of the centipede.

Writing poetry is not a job for delicate men.

Occipital flower is the head’s name.

Here are all the games, all the maps, all the

words,

including the ones to be invented.

Occipital flower is the head’s name.

Your voice.

Your faces.

Your mandalas of affection and scorn.

Lines disfigured on the convulsing body, exploding spectres.

Emerald.

Everything commences and ends with the enchantment of the emerald.

 

In memory of Rodrigo de Souza Leão, 2011

 

poem by Claudio Daniel

translation © Stefan Tobler