FOUNTAIN
II
"On the mother's mad smiles the raindrops
patter down. On their beloved
mad faces the lanterns tap
their yellow fingers.
Swaying. Pure.
Pure raindrops and lanterns. And the mothers
draw near, blowing on their cold fingers,
moving their bodies
through filial bones, tendons,
submerged organs.
And the intrinsic mothers calmly sit down
inside filial heads.
They sit there in slow and urgent silence,
seeing everything
and burning the images, fuelling the images,
while love keeps getting stronger.
Showering them in the face. Tender love.
Fierce love.
And the mothers are ever more beautiful.
Think the sons whom the mothers levitate.
Violent flowers strike their eyelids.
Above and below they breathe
in silence,
theirs faces gleaming in the spray
of raindrops,
around the lanterns. In the continuous
pourring down of sons.
Mothers are the loftiest things
created by sons, since they dwell
in their sons' deflagration, since
sons are like dandelion invaders
in their mothers' terrain.
And mothers are oil wells in the speech of their sons,
spurting through them
from out of the earth.
And the sons dive, in rubber suits, into the depths
of myriad waters
with the mothers wrapped like octopi around their hands
and around their tenderest nerves.
And the son sits with his mother at the head of the table.
Through him the mother fiddles
with the teacups and the forks,
and through her he thinks
no dead is possible, and the waters
are connected
through his hand touching the mad face
of his mother who can sense his touch
and through love, in love, until it's only possible
to love everything
and it's possible to rediscover everything through love."
Herberto Helder (Portugal, 1930–2015), Portuguese poet, translated by Richard Zenith. Herberto Helder's poetry and fiction is very visual, and has connections with Surrealism, still his style is difficult to define; he was a practitioner of experimental poetry and some call him an orphic or visionary poet (that somehow reminds Ezra Pound). Considered one of the most important contemporary Portuguese poets his poetry is not yet enough studied by academics due to the obscurity of his personality itself (he refused to take literary prizes or have media exposure) and the complexity of his paradoxal work that has a strange enchantment.
Photo: FOUNTAIN, mother and daughter, Wat Nokor temple, Cambodia. (April, 2017)
