Pulse

This that recedes

will come near to us

on the other side of the day.

Autumn: a single leaf

eaten by light: and the green

gaze of green upon us.

Where earth does not stop,

we, too, will become this light,

even as light

dies

in the shape of a leaf.

Gaping eye

in the hunger of day.

Where we have not been

we will be. A tree

will take root in us

and rise in the light

of our mouths.

The day will stand before us.

The day will follow us

into the day.

Paul Auster

todos os poemas

Interior

Grappled flesh

of the fully other and one.

And each thing here, as if it were the last thing

to be said: the sound of a word

married to death, and the life

that is this force in me

to disappear.

Shutters closed. The dust

of a former self, emptying the space

I do not fill. This light

that grows in the corner of the room

has moved.

Night repeats. A voice that speaks to me

only of smallest things.

Not even things - but their names.

And where no names are -

of stones. The clatter of goats

climbing through the villages

of noon. A scarab

devoured in the sphere

of its own dung. And the violet swarm

of butterflies beyond.

In the impossibility of words,

in the unspoken word

that asphyxiates,

I find myself.

Paul Auster

todos os poemas

White Nights

No one here,

and the body says: whatever is said

is not to be said. But no one

is a body as well, and what the body says

is heard by no one

but you.

Snowfall and night. The repetition

of a murder

among the trees. The pen

moves across the earth: it no longer knows

what will happen, and the hand that holds it

has disappeared.

Nevertheless, it writes.

It writes: in the beginning,

among the trees, a body came walking

from the night. It writes:

the body's whiteness

is the color of earth. It is earth,

and the earth writes: everything

is the color of silence.

I am no longer here. I have never said

what you say

I have said. And yet, the body is a place

where nothing dies. And each night,

from the silence of the trees, you know

that my voice

comes walking toward you.

Paul Auster

todos os poemas

Spokes

I.

Roots writhe with the worm - the sift

Of the clock cohabits the sparrow's heart.

Between branch and spire - the word

Belittles its nest, and the seed, rocked

By simpler confines, will not confess.

Only the egg gravitates.

II.

In water - my absence in aridity. A flower.

A flower that defines the air.

In the deepest well, your body is fuse.

III.

The bark is not enough. It furls

Redundant shards, will barter

Rock for sap, blood for veering sluice,

While the leaf is pecked, brindled

With air, and how much more, furrowed

Or wrapped, between dog and wolf,

How much longer will it stake

The axe to its gloating advantage?

...

Paul Auster

todos os poemas

To The Whore Who Took My Poems

some say we should keep personal remorse from the
poem,
stay abstract, and there is some reason in this,
but jezus;
twelve poems gone and I don't keep carbons and you have
my
paintings too, my best ones; its stifling:
are you trying to crush me out like the rest of them?
why didn't you take my money? they usually do
from the sleeping drunken pants sick in the corner.
next time take my left arm or a fifty
but not my poems:
I'm not Shakespeare
but sometime simply
there won't be any more, abstract or otherwise;
there'll always be mony and whores and drunkards
down to the last bomb,
but as God said,
crossing his legs,
I see where I have made plenty of poets
but not so very much
poetry.


Charles Bukowski