The Heart All Broken To Pieces In The Mind

Every time I contemplate a wide panorama,

forgetting the five feet six inches of height and
the one hundred and thirty-ve pounds in which I physically consist

I smile a supremely metaphysical smile for
those who dream that dreaming is a dream

and I love the truth of the
absolutely external with a noble purity of understanding.

Like all men endowed with great mental mobility,
I have an irrevocable,
organic love of settledness.

I walk uncertainly and allegorically,
unreally sentient.

My soul,
as always,
whether among bedclothes or among people,
was painfully conscious of the world.

It offends my intelligence that a man can master
the Devil without being able to master the Portuguese language.

And I,
who timidly hate life,
fear death with fascination.

I must not have known myself at all back then.

I was the runner who led the race until he fell down,
right before the finishing line.

That soft buzzing that didn’t belong to the office.

I am the love they shared,
which is why I’m able to hear them on this night when I can’t sleep,
and also why I’m able to live without joy.

And what feeling prevailed? The impossibility of having any feeling,
the heart all broken to pieces in the mind,
feelings all in a jumble,
conscious existence in a stupor,

and the heightening of some faculty akin to
hearing—but in the soul—in order to apprehend a definitive
useless revelation that’s always on the verge of appearing,
like truth,
and that always remains,
like truth,
the twin of what never appears.

For I suppose it’s clear by reading between the lines that the dreamer,
depending on his relative possibility of isolation and self-dedication,

should with greater or lesser intensity concentrate on his
work of pathologically stimulating his sensitivity to things and dreams.

—Nympha Negra, Collected Odes