(…cont.)
Counting to Ten in Portuguese
(for Francisco Pereira Coelho)
I looked into his eyes many times
for that dream unspoken,
this grandfather that kept
a sea smell in his blue jeans;
it was common as the earth
of his fields daily walked.
But something in his youth
broke up the light in barley
and escaped back to an island
harbor beyond the valley sun
that his heart could never quite
beat fast enough to win back again.
He was like a white wave crashing
over a black lava shoreline,
a seagull’s wake fixed into
a faraway flight on the horizon.
There, finally the steamer
ship came when he smiled:
all those other wrinkled whalers
sitting on the basalt bench,
my childhood memory found puffs
from a black smokestack
when they moved and he sat down
in the honored place among them.
He taught me to count to ten in Portuguese,
and in the full sunlight of our farm home
the language of his old callused hands
endearing remembered words to
this unheard of Pico Mountain,
this deeper pride than America
that he could never outlive.
I searched through the sweet range
of time where his stubble face,
his broken English made
the weather for whales more keen.
Now forty years embark a new vapor
curling up within a trail of mist
around your ancient village,
your eyes below a crown
pouring into my voyage
a Holy Ghost feast and prayer lived.
And I smile at the town’s humble
name of Little Pastured Goats.
I follow in their path across
the volcanic flows in front of the fish shack
to my place beside you, in a view
of white sails and green kale patches.
This Atlantic perfume of Cabrito
toasts a grand heritage of solitude,
this age of hearing your voice surround
again the tall strands of bamboo,
this walking by stone fences
far from the immigration that you knew.
Art Coelho
(published: Gávea-Brown V. XXI, 2000)
What placed me on the map of America? Rambling on pennies without any halos from wisdom. A kind of vaudeville act of thin air dancing away from despair. Somewhere between the immigration days of steamers and an American poet’s poverty I learned to be aware from a choir boy to dreams on fire. There’s a legacy in every breath. And never can a masquerade of desire win anything. There’s a hangman’s noose on the loose and Melville’s beard smells better in the fat of the flames that fan never be a soul for hire.
My gift never loses sight of the stars. Hunger for truth reaches through all the scars. The smile of the house painter. The pride of honest tears will get you far with transparent visions full of raw meat and the sweat that sets off the bandstand music to play on and on into the Arles moonlight. Van Gogh’s bloody ear at my feet. And when I went into the olive groves of Provence, mine were different than his. Vincent’s trees froze in 1927 before I could get there. But the same lavender light in between on the ground below the branches, the gnarled and twisted stumps and trunks we shared, and the starry night became my poet’s wine.
The Cream Can
(for Francisca Pereira Coelho)
Alongside worn out
harvester pulleys
and feeder chains
that Uncle Manuel one kept
well-oiled and humming
in a pregnant sound
within the long harvest
of ripe summer barley-
Grandpa Coelho’s cream can
abandoned to cobwebs
in the old Wheatville shop.
The rust in
its careless duty
of thirty silent years
has worked its beads
of brown through
the nostalgia of my dream
to salvage the longing
of an old memory
for this new purpose.
Now a cotton plant
from our sold farm
erect inside the can,
a complete stranger
to this north country,
this big sky of blizzards
and sagebrush eagles;
this land has never seen
fluffy white bolls
on purple stalks shining
in an October sun like
in the San Joaquin Valley
of my birth.
I drop these coins
from my paint-stained
working jeans at the end
of a long shift of sweat;
they fall into a different kind
of wishing well;
pocket change that
has a silver ring, echoing
from galvanized sides, making
the only real music I can
afford in my desire
to glimpse the Azores islands
that rushes in like a charm
of shiny pearls inside my head.
It’s a symbolic sound
my dream forever
turtle-crawling those
unknown beaches and ports
of nine island gems.
The light on red-tiled rooftops,
the barking of a dog
as you come up a narrow
old cobblestone lane.
How sweet the frame
made from a yearning breast.
Yes, heritage on hold,
hope for a luxury
of having at least one
bloodline possibility going home;
and a white sail of courage
lodging inside my heart
some favor from fate
beyond an unsold ticket’s despair,
in the rolling crest of waves-
Fajã da Caldeira de Santo Cristo
shore opening up
for the very first time
the Atlantic ocean there.
Art Coelho
(unpublished poem)