I slip into an era prior to the one I’m living
in; I enjoy feeling that I’m a contemporary of Cesário Verde
and that in me I have,
not verses like his,
but the identical substance of the verses that were his.
Great,
however,
is the man who realizes that the difference in distance from the
valley to the sky and from the hill to the sky makes no difference.
Let him tell a clerk to take care of a
certain matter because he doesn’t want to waste time on it
not because he doesn’t know how to take care of it.
Seeking out modes of inertia,
pleading to evade all personal struggle and social responsibility—this is the
substance from which I carved the imaginary statue of my existence.
We hear death in words they speak to express sensual bliss.
I’ve fulfilled something or other.
External things,
all of them distinct and now perfectly still,
even if they’re moving,
are to me as the world must have been to Christ when,
looking down at everything,
Satan tempted him.
I observe my soul with astonishment.