from “The Keeper”
Alberto Caeiro was born in Lisbon in 1889 and died one spring twenty-six years later, after an outpouring of verse that lasted a few weeks. He did not exist. Although the resulting book was called The Keeper of Sheep, it barely mentions sheep at all. He claimed he had no profession.
Negations are characteristic of Caeiro. He wanted to see freely, to have seeing as clear as a sunflower, an eye canceling itself out, bending toward the light only to peer beneath it. Maybe this is the reason his lines feel weightless.
If, after I die, someone wants to write my biography he writes, There's nothing simpler. / It just has two dates—the day I was born and the day I died. / Between the two, all the days are mine.
O Guardador de Rebanhos
2.
My seeing is clear
My seeing is
Clear like
Sheep my clear
my without
sheep my
Without
Seeing is clear
Like without
In a dream strip right up next to the Gulf Freeway. Unzoned, unavailed. Or it seemed like a dream while I was away. And your dad really let the lawn go.
Overtones of the 26-lane skimming the sound barrier. Thick with ragweed, ozone tracers. Blank cargo of our Saturday nights: ghost traffic, dead cicada, thunder at the peak of the thermometer.
Like the cold gaze of a sunflower, ranging freely over a parking lot, about to vanish. Are you still here. Crickets cry like incinerators.
The Keeper of Sheep
II.
My seeing is clear
like a sunflower.
I have the habit of walking the roads
Looking. [ to the right and. left
And sometimes
looking behind m
And what I see in each moment.
Is
if at birth
he could actually notice he’d been born
I woke up to find myself friendless, factless, living in my parents’ garage, and someone else. Such things happen, but not to me. Nothing happens to me.
I’m no one, an echo of refusal. I woke up back here, sky walled with blind glass. Centuries of dissociation, already writing. At 7:30 I walk to work.
My head hurts, the rain on the sidewalk is tired. It is stretched thin writing this surface, blue glass and dying live oaks, nearly empty, Looking to the right and left/ And sometimes looking behind me…
O meu olhar é nítido como um girassol. My seeing is clear like a sunflower. To see, to sim (to yes). Aye to eye. Yes, I am clear of sim, therefore I know (não- I no), clearly, nítido. Neatly. Perhaps I não by clearing what I sim. Or seem. The sim seen by the sunflower. Were you the last clear girassol here.
Moreira, my manager, stares blankly. Morning. I put the notebook away.
Every morning I walk to the back room of Jo-Ann Fabrics, where I assemble picture frames to order. The frames, however, fit every face in advance: Each customer deserves the same care as Moreira says. The store looks out onto an expansive parking lot; when I arrive, and when I leave, the lot is empty.
If someone
biography, my first translation begins. The rest is erased. On the other side: the word Phil, erased.
What are you working on in there my father doesn’t say. The workshop is in here. Rain patters loud against the headache, dull against the roof.
Before I came back here, it didn’t exist. Your name on my phone this your new number? Back in the pocket. I’d grown up thinking my life hadn’t started, so by the time I finally left, the details were mostly erased.
To be fair, neither did I. Freedom a gradient of blue false friend. Each no a hole, the way a tower of windows translates the empty sky.
Alberto Caeiro was a philosopher of não. I have no philosophy he writes. He was not a shepherd. He was not a writer. He hated books.
I've no ambitions or desires. My being a poet is not an ambition.
His short life was written out in service to the não, the opposite of a flock, buried in the end beside its master.
In between frames, I translate O Guardador de Rebanhos into The Keeper of Sheep. There are always reasons one begins to write an endless letter to someone who neither exists, nor ever wanted to. When I started, I was someone, too, and these things mattered. Now, to keep going, I sit in the workshop, erasing.
II.
My self is cleft like a sunflower.
I have the habit of walking on strings,
Looking to the rind and the lemon,
And sometimes looking at bells,
Doesn’t seem like anything’s wrong with you, to me.
My father’s facial hair, familiar, in the doorway to the workshop. Time for dinner. It was a film I think, where a man woke up and shaved off his mustache: no one seemed to notice.
Head thunders, the flight of a não that passes.
XLIII
Better the flight of. [ and leaves no trace
than the passage of the animal remembered by
that passes by the
[caeiro passes and is forgotten, as it should be.
The carne. no longer here and so no longer of use,
uselessly shows it was here.
the flight of the caeiro. the car
that passes.
better the cargo, the vehicle.
and is forgotten
…
We used to call these spaghetti bowls. Where the freeways cross that is, vehicles passing noiselessly in the gas-blanched sky. Or skyscrapers lurking on the plains like cops in Aviators. Woke up the storefronts, bricks a way of writing this blankness.
Like the suburbs, the details were peripheral, an oblique expression. To go on writing we emptied near-facts here and there, like stopping on a night walk and gently tipping over a police motorcycle.
Faces appear, flash of a smirk out their windows. When there are no sidewalks, I cross parking lots, medians. Rain pools in the ditches along the road. The path tapers out in front and behind. I walk to Jo-Ann Fabrics.
Moreira stands at the glass doorway watching the rain over the parking lot. I stand at my workstation, watching Moreira, printing yellow sales labels: Brown 35% Sheep Wool, Rayon, Wool-like Polyester Blend.
Moreira never notices anything different. But he didn’t know me before. Fabric Merchants Red Scarlet Sheep Wool Melton Coating Fabric. And maybe this is exactly what he wants in a Jo-Ann Fabrics employee. Tossed Sheep Black Quilter’s Showcase Super Snuggle Cotton Fabric.
I thought eventually Jo-Ann Fabrics would stop feeling like a translated Jo-Ann Fabrics, parallel to but separate from the source. It never stops.
Dress It Up Button Embellishments Baby Collection Baa Baa Baby Sheep
I was working at Jo-Ann Fabrics for a year before I realized I had been to this location, not once but many times, as a child. A glittery cornucopia, papier-mâché maple. Aged Christian rock on the fuzzy PA. A plastic lawn sunflower, eye averted from all this debris.
O meu olhar é nítido como um girassol. My seeing is clear, unobstructed, or my seeing is crisp, detailed?
For me, the two were always intertwined; I learned to clear in the crisp silence of eighteen years in traffic, staring at the grass, gliding past the empty sidewalks. Like you, I found that without all this, I was left with even less. I was left metaphysically thin, sentenced to the sidewalks of a narrative flickering out.
What is a parking lot but the final stage before disappearance. Somewhere off to the side of the road, on some grassy meridian, I thought I saw you, unsteady, pants down. Cars passed, and you were pissing into a milk jug, laughing.
In a dream I saw you under a streetlight. Purple glow at night, gnats clouding the flood zone. Floodwaters came and left you like this. Plywood rot, trance mosquitos in the damp magnolias, reeking. Eyes clear as sunflowers.
I opened my mouth as if to frame it. I had an answer for you, but no, that was phones ago. I shuffled through some papers.
Passport please, I said.
In the workshop my father left a water-stained book on the history of Houston. When my head hurts too much to translate, I open it up to a page where someone has drawn a sloppy star in the margin. The Port of Houston, I read,
was established by the Allen Brothers, two land speculators from New York. They marketed their new town to settlers without proving the central element of their scheme—that they could push a steamship a mile further up the Buffalo Bayou—Cibolo, or buffalo, was the bayou’s Comanche name—than the previous settlement.
The Allen Brothers spent a week traveling this fateful mile through torrential rains, hacking away overhanging trees, mossy vines, and clearing the bayou of debris. Finally, they just stopped. This site, Allen’s landing, would become the new port.
I put the book back; my head hurts again. I’m not sure how to write it, this dull sense that the Allen Brothers’ week never ended, that what happened to the city, to you and to me continued their centuries of clearing.
Few know the patch of sunflowers next to the Jo-Ann Fabrics parking lot. On my way to Jo-Ann Fabrics, I stand by the sunflower patch, watching rain drip down the leaves of the sunflowers, descending the slope to the bayou, where the water joins the muddy stream. Stray dogs, pushed out by a nearby development, fearsome, ascend the slope. I retreat to the parking lot.
Was this the spot? Are your golf balls down there, at the concrete bottom, under the brown runoff, the fertilizer, silly string, hubcaps, iridescent crumpled balloons?
I want to ask the sheepdog on Facebook. July 14, 2016. New friend request: idioteqqq (0 friends). In the picture, the sheepdog is shaking off, in the middle of a field, in slowmo. I wrote hello; I was sure it was you.
Few know the usernames
of the river few know
the usernames of the river of my village
and where it comes from and where
it goes all day
All day no one thinks about the other side of
the screen of the river of my village
flowing out freer
beyond the world and bigger
in the rain
it is raining
on foot beside it
It may flood says Moreira, looking out at the rain over the parking lot of Jo-Ann Fabrics. I hand a customer their frames when I look down and realize I’ve put the wrong pictures in them. Or at least, it seems like the wrong face. The customer doesn’t seem to notice. The rain pools under the tires of a pickup parked by the curb.
Because of the floods, there are no basements here; the workshop is floored with cement. Lying in the workshop and listening to the rain, I remember a dream: somewhere under the stairs there should be a trapdoor. In the dream, I remember, I went on descending, lower, lower than the lowest level.
If there is any freedom in me, I’ll say no again. I will wake up tomorrow with a new phone again, if I can, without a trace. It may sound cold, but to stay would be worse. I get desperate, like closing time at Costco. The time I was looking for my mother, and every aisle was full of mothers rushing to the checkouts. The lights going out one by one, rain on the high metal ceilings, sad gallons of peanut butter.
The doorway to the workshop opens a crack, slowly, then wider, in the dark, as if somehow almost across the divide. You’re not going to get better like this. Why not see who’s still in town.
That was phones ago, I don’t say. I know.
What are you working on no one continues. The garage door is open halfway, I begin to write it down, the night opening, letting in raindrops in the dark
como uma borboleta pela janela
I look up from the paper; how long have I been writing? The door to the workshop gapes on its hinges.
Alberto Caeiro was a dead end, a living end; with his first book, he’d reached the end of refusal.
I am a keeper of sheep.
My sheep are my thoughts…
…And I don’t know what I’m thinking
Nor do I want to.
After a few tepid attempts to follow The Keeper of Sheep, he died.
But Caeiro, like I said, did not exist. He was discovered by someone named Fernando Person.
Fernando Pessoa was a quiet man with inward facing teeth. He excused himself to the restroom of Jo-Ann Fabrics, when no one was looking, and bit down into the entire earth, as deep as he could.
When his tooth met stone in the dark, he called it Alberto.
On the way home from Jo-Ann Fabrics, the rain falls into the center of the lot, where I am waiting, a comma on the blank page.
The day I finally gave up, Pessoa begins.
The page blinks.