Japanese Garden
I curve like a wooden bridge
over a lake lit up by red carps
I am hard and dry and barely adorned
like a sand garden
(though there are stones that blossom
like flowers)
silent like rice paper
on which
nothing
has yet been written
What Do I Know?
I know few things I know that reading
is a choreography
that to be concentrated is to be distracted
I know that first one loves a name I know
that what one loves in love is the name of the love
I know few things I forget quickly the things
that I know I know that forgetting is musical
I know that what I learned from the sea was not the sea
that only death teaches what it teaches
I know that it is a world of fear of neighbors
of sleep of animals of fear
I know that the strengths of coexistence survive through time
being erased though
I know that surrender resists
that waiting is violent
I know that intimacy is the name given
to an infinite distance
I know few things
Translations from the Portuguese