Winter Berries

Now it is Christmas in the woods
and the pines are hung with gloomy light,
the black silk of the pond’s eye
has clouded in its wax of ice,
and two boys that I remember
have come to gather winter berries
and the boughs of the white pine,
an idea that no one put them up to
although they talk about their mothers
as though such a thing might make
a happiness around the doors of a house,
as though only the women would know
what to do with armload of red and green:
And it’s my friend and I walking
the corrupt ice of the pond until
we see the purple tangle of the winterberry bush
and the yellow stalks of the dead reeds
and suddenly his legs burst through
in a great crash and gush—up to his knees
in the shallow water, and he curses
and lumbers to shore, smashing a wake
of splintered ice while I, a few feet away
walk as though charmed. Later, sacks filled
with berries, and on a dark hill hacking
the bottommost tender branches of pine,
we see that his brown pants have frozen
and he bends them, makes the crackle
around the instep of his boot. I don’t
have to ask if he is cold. His face is
flushed and young and beautiful,
though I would not have said so then,
but now, refracted across so much memory and longing
it darkens any recollection that might follow it:
I know we must have hiked home in the short
winter dusk with our arm full of garland,
but I don’t recall our mother’s greetings
nor can I remember the sprays on the weathered doors
or windowsills, nor the Christmas lights
of that particular year. And the boys,
who have gone forward into the brambles
of what we call lives, are gone forever
except for the persistent traces in one
mind or another, never to be trusted, already
passed into the intricate fiction of what is behind.
Longing for what then? When the sun
draws behind the low hills west of the pond,
the alder still purples, the winter-dead
grasses still bleach in the bone cold: even
though news houses break the clean lines
of thicket, there is a luster that comes up
in moments before the sky gives over
to the waiting stars: no matter how you watch it
you cannot gauge the precise moment when it vanishes,
you cannot be sure what you wanted to rush to
and gather in your arms and save.
                                         Frank X.Gaspar

Ref.Bibliográfica: From the collection Mass for the Grace of a Happy Death , Anhinga Press (Anhinga Prize for Poetry, 1994). Frank X. Gaspar.


                                   

Frank X. Gaspar, escritor luso-americano (poeta e ficcionista) de ascendência picoense, é natural de Provincentown, mas vive na Califórnia há muitos anos, onde lecciona escrita criativa na Long Beach City College e no Graduate Writing Program at Antioch University, Los Angeles. Da sua obra literária destaca-se: Quatro coleções de poemas: The Holyoke (Morse Prize for Poetry), Mass for the Grace of a Happy Death (Anhiga Prize), A Field Guide to the Heavens (Brittingham Prize), and Night of a Thousand Blossoms (Alice James Books); a premiadíssima novela Leaving Pico, traduzida em Portugal e publicada pela editora Salamandra em 2002 com o título Deixando a Ilha do Pico. É detentor de inúmeros prêmios,incluindo o National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature, o California Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, três Pushcart Prizes, and multiplas inclusões no Best American Poetry.
Sua mais recente obra é a novela Stealing Fatima(Counterpoint,2009:320p).
Frank X. Gaspar tem publicado sua poesia com regularidade em algumas das mais prestigiadas revistas literárias dos Estados Unidos e também dos Açores,sendo com frequência referenciado em artigos,ensaios,trabalhos acadêmicos como uma das mais expressivas vozes da literatura luso-americana.

Créditos Fotos: 1) Frank X.Gaspar – Acervo do Blog Comunidade:
                      2) Natal na Costa Leste – OnésimoT.Almeida