Brazil? He twirled a Button -- Without a glance my way -- "But -- Madam -- is there nothing else -- That We can show -- Today?"
—Emily Dickenson, "I asked no other thing"
Brazil is the country of the future and always will be.
—Charles de Gaulle
This phone's too strong for me
It's like a backhoe steered by an ape
A toddler in the cockpit of a jet
Brain surgery performed by ants
The desert of my bedroom by analogy
Would be full of Brazilian women poets now:
Clarise Lispector, Cecília Meireles, Gilka Machado, Ana C . . .
I can't read their poems, though—I'll have to leave them be.
But why this urge to poetry
That's better stilled, perhaps—
Silence being preferable to romantic doubt?
The ladies who surround my bed are for the present dead.
They cannot at the moment see or hear,
Deferring conversation to another life. Next year?

Monday, January 13, 2O25
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