Meditações - o relógio do pai

Radiant Ivory

After the death of my father, I locked

 myself in my room, bored and animal-like.

 The travel clock, the Johnnie Walker bottle,

 the parrot tulips—everything possessed his face,

 chaste and obscure. Snow and rain battered the air

 white, insane, slathery. Nothing poured

 out of me except sensibility, dilated.

 It was as if I were sub-born—preverbal,

 truculent, pure—with hard ivory arms

 reaching out into a dark and crowded space,

 illuminated like a perforated silver box

 or a little room in which glowing cigarettes

 came and went, like souls losing magnitude,

 but none with the battered hand I knew.

Henri Cole