issue 23 > poetry > cruz

They obstruct their ears with noise
or maybe music, a flexible notion
compared to the arduous idea of poetry

I ask myself at times about the flow
emerging from the for us mute button
like an oval sepulchre embedded in the ear

With this circuit-breaker the thread
to the world is cut; there is, of course, the gaze
the smell of the subway cars and of the people
that fill them, but the world remains

restricted to the solitude of that music
which for us is silence, just the image
of someone concentrating
on that nothingness, more our own than theirs

who seem to us descending into the abyss






Also by Gastão Cruz and translated by Alexis Levitin:

Lithuanian Cemeteries