One step from my own spirit.
One impossible step from God.
Attentive to the real: here.
I happen here.




I: Base



Transposition

In the rising morning
this garden no longer geometry
is gradation of light and sharp
discontinuity of planes.

Everything recreates itself and instant
shifts angle and face in
conformation with the very lifelight
that inaugurates gardens in amplitude

that wakes flowers in shifting
colorinstants and revives and
throws them lucidly
in continuous transposition.





Time

Flux obliges
any flower
to open in itself
without memory.

Flux wave being
impedes any flower
from reinventing itself in
repeated flower.

Flux dethrones
any flower
from its living now
and turns it to sleep.

Universeflux
repels
among flowers these
chantflowerlives.

— But this is what the word
chantflowerexperience
perpetually again reborn
obliges flux

it sits astride flux in a miracle
of life.





Arabesque

Geometry in mosaic
creates labrynthine text
most intricate rays
clearcut complexities.

Geometry in live
minutiae’s florid plane
geometry all in flight
and the text as in spring.

Order transposing itself in beauty
beyond planes in the infinite
and the full undeciphered text
burning in mosaic flower.

Chaos tamed into plenitude
            spring.





Stone

Stone is transparent:
silence visible
in its density.

(Clear texture and in
tegral definitive verb
stone silences.)

Verb is transparent:
silence contains it
in pure eternity.





Poem I

Novifluent sun
transfigures experience:
another being comes to be
and subsists in full.

It is a continual being reborn
that inaugurates within:
life never acheived
attempting the absolute.

Spirit born
of restless waters
fixed verb: sun,
novifluent.





Skein

A braid is undone:
hands calmly
loosen threads
inutilize
the amorously woven.

A braid is undone:
hands seek the depth
of the inexhaustible net
annulling weft
and form.

A braid is undone:
hands seek the end
of time and the beginning
of themselves, before
created weft.

Hands
destroy, seeking themselves
before braid and memory.





Ludism

To break the toy
is more fun.

The pieces are other games:
we’ll construct another secret.
The shards are real others
forehidden by form
and the shattered game
multiplies itself to infinity
and is more real than integrity: more lucid.

Fragile worlds acquired
in the breaking up of one alone.
And the knowing of the multiple real
and savor of real possibles
and free play instituted
against the limitation of things
against mirror’s earlier form.

And the vertigo of new forms
multiplying consciousness
and the consciousness created
in multiple lucid games
exhausting being’s levels
in the exercise of play.

To break the toy still
is to play more.





Hands

With hands bare
to work the countryside:

hands wounding themselves
on beings, rough edges
of underlying unity

hands unearthing
lightfragments
of the anterior mirror.

With hands bare
to work the countryside:

to denude the essential star,
with no pity on the blood.





Leap

I

Form’s
ungrasped moment

leap seeking
moment’s
beyond.

II

To devitalize form
to dis - member
to dis - make

and - beyond structure -
to live the pure un
inhabitable act.





Laboratory

We dis - arm the fact
to - patiently -
re - generate structure

to be born of what
only happens.

We re - make life.





Touch

Hands grope
words
fabric
of forms.

Touch on the dark of words
hands capturing the fact
text and texture: at
last matter.





Nucleus

To learn to be earth
and, more than earth, stone
nuclear diamond
crystallizing word.

Definitive word.
Rough word, not plastic.





Challenge

Against the flowers I live
against limits
against appearance pure attention
constructs a countryside with
no more gardens
than essence.





Poem II

To be in a mirror
flux held back
before itself

lucidity.





Dialogue

Variable lucid wing
plotting verbs veils
of human meaning onto
things

lucid thirst un
expressed inexhaustible
infertile prospecting
of the secret

text act humanity
variable wing dialogue
between verb and in
effable real.





Pictures

I

Circle around
act:

smooth surface
of the sphere
of the concrete
impenetrable ocean

— blood’s verbalization.

II

A blind node
and the light detaching it
in a total live
infinite space.

A blind node
and the light contouring it
dense light generating a cruel
clearcut plane.

A blind node
and the light crossing over
defining its being
without diluting it.

III

Free fragments:
colors sounds figures
in lucid dispersion

vertigo

Free fragments:
constellations in flight
dissonance.

Free fragments
and free unity
freely accepted

(greatest game
past childhood).





Series

First
the appeal
(word parallel
to universe).

Then
invoked potencies
forms are plotted pure
ludic map.

Finally
act’s conclusion
love to be possible
dawns
lucid.





II: (–)



Speech

All
will be difficult to say:
the real word
is never easy.

All will be hard:
pitiless light
excessive living too
conscious of being.

All will be
able to wound. Will be
agressively real.
So real it rends us.

There is no pity in signs
nor even in love: being
is excessively lucid
and word is dense and wounds us.

(All words are cruelty.)





Settling

O bird, in my hand
are met
your intact liberty
my acute consciousness.

O bird, in my hand
your chant
of pure vitality
meets my humanity.

O bird, settled
in my hand,
will it be possible for us
to sing in unison

if you are the rare settling
of living feeling
and I, weeping spilt
into word?





Rose

I murdered the name
of the flower
and the very flower complex form
I symbolized into symbol
(but without eliding the blood).

Yet if, uniquely,
the word FLOWER — word
in itself is humanity
how to express anymore
non-verbal, living density?

(Ex-rose, the evening
the horizon.)

I murdered the word
and hold my living hands in blood.





Midday

At midday life
is impossible.

Light destroys secrets:
light is hard on the eyes
acid on the spirit.

Light is too much for humans.
(Yet how would you know
when seeing by the light
of you yourself?)

Midday! Midday!
Life is lucid and impossible.





Revelation

The door is open
as if today were childhood
and things didn’t keep thoughts
forms of us written in them.

The door is open. What meaning
is held by what is original and pure?
Beyond what is human, being integrates itself
and the door remains open. Uselessly.





Ode I

The real? Word
human thing
humanity
penetrates the universe
and here is what surrenders,
so only, to me, a rose.





Destruction

Thing against thing:
useless cruelty
of analysis. Cruel
knowing that rends
the knowing being.

Life against thing:
violation
of form, recreating
it in wise and useless
human syntheses.

Life against life:
sterile cruelty
of light that consumes itself
disintegrating essence
uselessly.





Towers

To construct abstract towers
yet the strife is real. Our vision
constructs itself upon strife. The real
will ache in us forever.





Choirs

Pungent choirs
twilight’s
choirs

to be lost in
voicefragments

edges

violation
of an only lucid
silence.





Circles

There is a moon
light
beyond
the circle day

there is a moon
another circle.





Cloister

Cell
where no palm
contemplates
the pacified face
in cold aridity

solitude without images
forever.





Mummy

Liana
lanyard
line.

Turns and more turns
tight concentric
turns.

White spirals
white linen
unguent incense bruising
aromas.

Lianas
lanyards of expectance
incubating sleep.

Indivisible white
line:
archaic white around
nothing.






Mollusk

Smooth convex
surface
doesn’t reveal its inside:
only shines.

The entrance
strait cupola
sober shadowy
grotto.

The sequence
wound incline
straitens in labyrinthine
astonishment.

The end
inner limit
nothing is beyond itself
final point.

The exit
is the return.





Chart

There is an intact bearing, an
absolute aridity
in the bird that settles. In it
settling is the chart: there is no more
need for flight.





Notice

We know no more of the boat
but there is always a shipwreck:
one that survives
boat and itself
to etch solitude
on rock.





Lullabies

I

Form is lost in silence
and color is no longer live
plasticity’s word:
things that were real and beautiful.

Sleep
obliterates the real: the eye keeps quiet
in the final indistinction of bearings.

II

Not to know not to know not to know not to know
to be consumed
by neuter time
arythmic space
where being’s blood
doesn’t belong to me.

III

Constellated water
through uncertain hands

and the stars overturned in time.

IV

A little lake
without a taste of form
a center repose
without anything
without bottom
lake eye hidden
in sleep.



III: (+)



Ode II

Love, immor
tality of form’s
instant totalization
in living act: dark
force remaking being.

Love, moment
of being reflected
eternally by the spirit.





Ode III

It’s little to live
but it weighs
as all being
as all light
as time’s concentration.





Tillage

Seed in its furrow
and live time.

Seed in its furrow
and rhythmic life flowing
to fruit’s realization.





Flight

Arrow act not verb
pure impulse
cuts the instant
and is made life
in so fragile occuring

brief lucidity
of occurred
movement.





Red

Tension of the rose in
wise maturity
redsky contained
in maximum horizon.

Tension of the horizon in
red rose transposed
wise rose in its
ripe silence.





Sunflower

I want to express the flower
and the sunflower picks me:
helianthus byzant gold light
            gold gold

Veering from the horizon
therefore always
faithful stilt
staring at light intensely

the sunflower picks me:
gilded adoration
tranquil fixation
lucid warmth.

Flower forever and much more
than flower.





Gesture

Palm
immobile
green

insistent green
calm green anxiety.

Silence insisting
on blind unity.

Existence in cold
open splendor

Gesture fixed in light
calm green anxiety

Palm
immobile
life

Immobile palm. Palm.





Sensation

I see to sing the bird
I touch this song with my nerves
its taste of honey. Its form
generating itself from the bird
as aroma.

I see to sing the bird and through
more dense perception
I hear distance opening
like a rose
in silence.





Frond

Life open without rhythm
multiplied in
a thousand open laminae
a thousand laminae living light

laminae under light
as meanings.





Light


Lamp sus
pended, suspended

intangible miracle
horizon.

We watch it fascinated.





Aurora

Daybreak
negation of light’s
rediscovered
infinite vertigo.

Daybreak
unity’s clean figure.





Median

Half moon.
Half word.
Half life.

Not enough?





Reflection

Lake in circle
circle water
sky grasped
eternity in time.



IV: (End)



Questions

a)
Architected
fruit:
how do we be it?

b)
Difficult real.
Real fruit.
How, through
form
distinguish it?

c)

Sharp
formless
light
of what we are.
How, without vaccilation,
to live it?





Thirst

1.

To drink the hour
to drink water
to get drunk
on water alone.

2.

Water? Only this
purifies.

3.

Greater unhidden
spring with neither
Narcissus
nor flower.

4.

Blessed be thirst
for tearing our eyes away
from stone.

Blessed be thirst
for teaching us the purity
of water.

Blessed be thirst
for bringing us
together at the spring.





Flux

The genesis of waters
is secret and infinite
it hides between stones
from all contemplation.
The genesis of waters
is in itself.
.............................

The movement of waters
is an unconscious path
continuous mutation
never terminated.

It is its own self
same vital path.
.............................

The end of waters
is dissolution and mirror
death of all rhythm
in living contemplation.

Self-awakening
of self.





Rebecca

Pitcher-girl and her
essential gesture: giving water.





The Name

Choice of name: that’s everything.

Name circumscribes
the new man: same,
repetition of the human
in unnamed being.

Man all blank, word’s
virgin
is to be evented:
his naked existence
begs the name.

Blank
sacred name that does
not define, yet points:
that nears it to us
marked by the human verb.

Choice of name: that’s
the secret.





Tightrope Walker

Essentially equilibrium:
neither maximum nor minimum.

Determined path
movements forever precise
controlled fear mask
of difficult serenity.

Attention directed direct gaze
foot on wire on edge
to be in one sole clearcut idea
equilibrium. Equilibrium.

Does the trial end? Only when
trapeze offers flight
and possible fall challenges
the whole body’s precision.

The trial ends if adventure
even sharper shows itself
mortal intense dishuman
essential disequilibrium.





Advent

What will be born
from this multiple time?

From the wave
rhythmic
amplitude
of amorphous
intensity
rhythmically lacerated

by the multiple that one
more than time will become
and what light will there be
beyond time?





Star

Over the landscape a point
of complete cosmic light
and fixed scene
that does not enclose it.

The star completes
the unity it does
not inhabit.





Dispersion

Birds dispersed
in more infinite skies

created exact distances
pure lines of being in time

fled in palpitations
of absolute clarity

beyond appearance lost themselves
intact in existence.





Recumbent Statue

I

Contained
in its free abandon
dynamism feeds
on its pure contention.

An atmosphere
recumbent around such
force silence

as if recumbent guarded
secret’s total gesture.

II

One recumbent
is more than one dead: it inhabits
times unknown
to dead and living.

One recumbent
ressucitated by silence
possesses itself in being
and inhabits us.

III

We see only repose
as a neuter face
beyond all that
signifies.

(But if we saw ourselves
in the totalized verb
— form that concentrates itself
beyond us —

(But if we saw ourselves
in being’s contention
repose would be
clearcut expression.)

We see only
repose:
word’s contention
in silence.

IV

It lies
upon the real the useless
gesture: this palm.

Word conquered
and forever inexhaustible.




•—•—•—•—•



Orides de Lourdes Teixeira Fontela was born on April 21, 1940 in São João da Boa Vista, São Paulo, Brazil. Her father was an illiterate laborer, and her mother stayed home. It is said that Orides Fontela was born with syphilis. Her mother taught her to read and write with “slaps and ear-pulling.” At a very early age, she began reciting her poems in church, and soon began publishing in children’s magazines. Her poetry was discovered by the critic António Cándido, who seems to have arranged for her higher education at the University of São Paulo. She was licensed in Philosophy in 1972, taught for a time, and was a librarian until her early retirement. Her third book of poems, Alba, won the Prémio Jabuti, one of Brazil’s most prestigious literary awards. She was notoriously difficult, unconcerned about her appearance and completely graceless. She had very few friends in the literary world. Solitary, sickly, suicidal, she died of tuberculosis exacerbated by alcoholism and near-poverty on November 2, 1998. “Poetry is the greatest good,” she wrote in one of her 250-odd short poems published in 5 books between 1970 and 1997.

First posted by Berkeley Neo-Baroque Gang of One, 3.16.2006
Under continual revision
Reproduction rights granted upon request