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"The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness."
--Elizabeth Barrett Browning
I.
There is a legend that my grandfather is Portuguese.
He seduced my grandmother to the woods, to smother in Portuguese.
He threatened to leave her shoeless, miles from home,
Unless he could, he told her, love her like no other, in Portuguese.
His grotesque sonnets staked his meter,
And as she cried he hushed her in Portuguese.
He kept his promise only when all was spent,
And he tired, and said he’d call her, in Portuguese.
II.
He went off to war, hovered like a storm of bees.
And her waiting burned there like a swarm of bees.
Days buzzed on with the Luftwaffe
While the seed gathered thick like a swarm of bees.
Ah! A letter, finally, a note! But in short sentences,
An English wife settled in, rather than the swarm of bees.
No husband, no father, no choice for her stung womb,
Swelled then emptied, and emptied of father, from swarm to bee.
III.
The seed became the father of the sea,
Being not exactly fathered of the sea--
His daughters took snatches of sun,
found damp froths of comfort in the lather of the sea,
And in the coupling water the wanderer bled,
Flinging his blood in waves that gathered in the sea--
Until he found us all in pieces, and struggled to mesh them.
And he knew there was more to death than life after the sea.
IV.
Scarantino’s Pessoa spoke to you harder than it does to me,
“Autopsicografia” to the fingidor who further laid his woes to me.
My future will not copy fair my past--
And you still rape as surely as you left your nose to me.
And tell thy soul, its roots are left in mine.
Mais ou menos, do your sacred brothers speak notes of me?
Drop heavily down, burst, shattered, everywhere!
Your language, if you speak it, prays under its soul to me.
V.
There is a legend that my grandfather is Portuguese.
Holy, holy, his faded form, bracing the spring of her color in Portuguese.
I will be the escaped one, lost from this nada com so nada a volta,
Who crept his careless drops down the years in coffers of Portuguese.
Now we wish to collect, now answer for this,
Sixty years that hid thoughts of the half-bothered Portuguese,
You need to know the lives you laid waste to,
Or at least tainted into being, with your Mafioso offer of Portuguese.
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