Buenos Aires

Eu adoro BAires, e encontrei este poema de Robert Lowell numa reprodução do nº 1 do volume 1 do The New York Reviem of Books. Ainda está tudo lá!! E mais, Robert Lowell era amigo da Elizabeth Bishop, uma das minhas poetas favoritas!

BUENOS AIRES

In my room at the Hotel Continental

a thousand miles from nowhere,

I heardthe bulky, beefy breathing of the herds.

Cattle furnished my new clothes:

my coat of limp, chestnut-colored suede,

my sharp shoesthat hurt my toes.

A false fin de siecle decorum snored over Buenos Aires,

lost in the pampas and run by the barracks.

Old strong men denied apotheosis,bankrupt,

on horseback, welded to their horses,

moved white marble rearing moon-shaped hooves,

to strike the country down.

Romantic military sculpture waved sabers over Dickensian architecture,

laconic squads patrolled the blanksl eft by the invisible poor.

All day I read about newspaper coup d'états of the leaden, internecine generals

—lumps of dough on the chessboard—

and never saw their countermarching tanks.

Along the sunlit cypress walks of the Republican Martyrs' graveyard,

hundreds of one-room Roman temples hugged their neo-classical catafalques.

Literal commemorative busts preserved the frogged coats

and fussy, furrowed foreheads of those soldier bureaucrats.

By their brazen doors a hundred marble goddesses wept like willows.

I found rest by cupping a soft palm to each hard breast.

That night I walked the streets.

My pinched feet bled in my shoes.

In a park I fought off seduction from the dark python bodies of new world demigods.

Everywhere, the bellowing of the old bull

—the muzzled underdogs still roared for the brute beef of Peron,

the nymphets' Don Giovanni.

On the main square a white stone obelisk rose like a phallus without flesh or hair

—always my lighthouse homeward to the hotel!

My breath whitened the winter air,

I was the worse for wear.

When the night's blackness spilled,

I saw the light of morning on Buenos Aires

filled with frowning, starch-collared crowds.