Brazil - Elizabeth Bishop

Brazil, January 1, 1502

... embroiled nature... tapestried landscape.

– Landscape into Art, by Sir Kenneth Clark

Januaries, Nature greets our eyes

exactly as she must have greeted theirs:

every square inch filling in with foliage

– big leaves, little leaves, and giant leaves,

blue, blue-green, and olive,

with occasional lighter veins and edges,

or satin underleaf turned over;

monster ferns

in silver-gray relief,

and flowers, too, like giant water lilies

up in the air – up, rather, in the leaves –

purple, yellow, two yellows, pink,

rust  red and greenish white;

solid but airy; fresh as if just finished

and taken off the frame.

A blue-white sky, a simple web,

backing for feathery detail:

brief arcs, a pale-green broken wheel,

a few palms, swarthy, squat, but delicate;

and perching there in profile, beaks agape,

the big symbolic birds keep quiet,

each showing only half his puffed and padded,

pure-colored or spotted breast.

Still in the foreground there is Sin:

five sooty dragons near some massy rocks.

The rocks are worked with lichens, gray moonbursts

splattered and overlapping,

threatened from underneath by moss

in lovely hell-green flames,

attacked above

by scaling-ladder vines, oblique and neat,

“one leaf yes and one leaf no” (in Portuguese).

The lizards scarcely breathe; all eyes

are on the smaller, female one, back-to,

her wicked tail straight up and over,

red as red-hot wire.

Just so the Christians, hard as nails,

tiny as nails, and glinting,

in creaking armor, came and found it all,

not unfamiliar:

no lovers’ walk, no bowers,

no cherries to be picked, no lute music,

but corresponding, nevertheless,

to an old dream of wealth and luxury

already out of style when they left home –

wealth, plus a brand-new pleasure.

Directly after Mass, humming perhaps

L’homme armé or some such tune,

they ripped away into the hanging fabric,

each out to catch an Indian for himself –

those maddening little women who kept calling,

calling to each other (or had the birds wakep up?)

and retreating, always retreating, behind it.

(do livro “Elizabeth Bishop / The complete poems: 1927-1979”, Farrar, Straus and Giroux)