Roberto Piva

        Piva with the formidable poet and
        agitator, Ademir Assunção.

Ritual of the 4 Winds & the 4 Hawks

      for Marco Antônio de Ossain

          Within me I bear the guardians of celestial Circuits.
              — The Book of Coming Forth by Day

There where the hawk of the North manifests
           its blazing shadow
There where adventure keeps its skulls
           out of reach from dawn’s voodoo
There where language’s rainbow is
           charged with subterranean wine
There where the orixás dance at the velocity
           of pure vegetal beings
Flock of river-stones
Eyes in the circuit of Ursa Major
           in mad attack
Eyes of floral metabolism
Forest cushions
Silent muzzle of the jaguar with
           sabotage footsteps
Rich flesh of Exú in shells of night
Black-hawk of the east in the sacred storm
Its cranium ignites in white lily frenzy
Beat the drum
           to the rhythm of astounding dreams
to the rhythm of shipwrecks
           to the rhythm of the teenagers
                      at the doors of asylums
           to the rhythm of the flock of atabakis
Beat the drum
           to the rhythm of sepulchral offerings
           to the rhythm of alchemical levitation
           to the rhythm of Jovian paranoia
Orgiastic chiefs of the drum
With my Skate-hawk
Drum in the turn of the ganymede century
Iemanjá and her hair, that foam.

    — São Paulo, Oct/94




VII SHAMANIC SONGS


          Loose desire!
          We naked cry to you
          — Do what you please.
              — W.C. Williams


I.

canoe from Amazonas
in the peyote-eye
point blank in the sky
tames vegetation and agriculture
loves astronomy
& zigzag vampires
incandescent hosanna / crinkled flower / savage angel
jaguar couchant on amethyst
& dream’s youngest bird
so near death

II.

pure love monster
curare
style of Nazaretequi ceramics
Zeus’s pandemonium
Eros piercing
The tympanum with a .38
barbed-wire hawk
nucleus of faithful poison

III.

kid Crevel
kid hell
bathed in the clear green
of the tropical morning
good poetic muscles
kid Nerval
hanged man’s blue cock
in the fold of night

IV.

the mushroom is calm
& nature insecure
boys drenched
in tears and sweat
Hermes
in the gullet
of the empire of the dead

V.

sylvan strawberries
split in the wasps’ sun
sails rape the sea
& disappear
on the plane of madness
passion agitates
january
ferns

VI.

indian boy my love
for three nights this burning
has confused medusas in their hearts
seeds & roots
where islands
raise
their ardour

VII.

constellation of swift fish: love
the sea
made poetry
by Homer
in technicolor
wine unbinds
my lagunar hand
in the astronautical instinct
of the species.

    — Ilha Comprida, 86


INVENT YOUR COLORS, SHATTER YOUR FRONTIERS


          Les mots sont dons mon oeuvre que des simples
          tremplins, d’où montent et et retombent en bond-
          issant des corps spirituels et mystiques.
              — Ma Révolution, Macolm de Chazal


Dante was a Visconti bruxo
his violet fingers blended simples,
poisons & heartless purgatories
On the ninth hour of the ninth day of
the ninth month
I was nine days with a fever
Everything new is
in Hell




On Curepipe
in the Mauritanian Isles
Malcolm de Chazal
prophesied love knowing
           & the Godflower
Elfin moondrum
bluish boys
mountains of Saturn its hands
held high




Ângelus Silesius, are you Dionysus
           or what?
Bees flit in the landscape of
           sunflowers
Lagoons receive the hot bodies of
           teenage boys
Summer roars in the pink sky
irerês pass through my lysergic
           centipede head
Ângelus Silesius, are you dancing? Are you Shiva?
The strings of an old contrabass
           stab the silence




          ...this heaven is one of blue vipers.
              — Herberto Helder

This heaven is:
replete with respiratory races.
Clouds, parakeets, black grapes
on the banks of debauche.

This heaven is:
lightning & doces de leite,
dagger escaping from the bath
of vertebrae.
acuacã-boy dancing
in the foreign sun.

This heaven is:
mamona leaves, submarines
cruising in their own blood.
Levity. Frenetic flowers.
Whispering batuque: I too
have passed through hell.




for Flávio & Antônio

my shoulder east
my heart north
flood’s sparring
cloud of luminous birds
beating mouth with abyss

    — Mairiporã, 95




UFOS

morning
              sniffs out
density of
                    ORGONE
                    spoor
                 in extra-
                 pink storm
           emerald gaze
           pupilary lightning
           serpent am i, the
                               flautist
FLYING SAUCERS
           ARE ANGELS (Pasolini)
on that morning
           everything was said
burning its pores
                 one by one


    — Ilha Comprida, 90




Apropos Pasolini

when you meet a boy
near a fountain
& he bends to water
as in Caravaggio
twilight’s wild shadow
with the tourqoise sun
in his bristly hair
it’s a moment as aching
as pagan solfège
after the orgy
this is how the gods grow
in the springtime of their melancholy ardor
they are angels people visionary boys
who do not weaken under the pinchers
of the blind men who lost the Word

    — March/morning, 87




Fecal soul against the dictatorship of science
Street of long knives
Fascist boy as lovely as the great eskimo night
Hellfire club: Alchemists Shamans
           Beatniks
Je vois l’arbre à la langue rouge (Michaux)
Temple
Procession of holy speech
Gods in pitch dark contemplate the sex
           of the sliding-board angel
Happy famished half-naked boys dance
           like feral bibelots
Stones with their silk mouths
Giving birth to an invisible existence
Everything you call history is my flight plan
           away from the civilization you people made

    — Represa de Mariporã, 95




WITCH DOCTOR BOY (CORYBANTIC POEM)

I.

          C’est l’heure des mauvais garçons
          l’heure des mauvais voyous
              — René Crevel

witch doctor boys
dressed as angels in Canebrake
save Eros from the street
of junkyard cities
in the rite of the mage of Love
they drink Death in a
Skull cup

II.

          The solar annulus is the intact anus of its adolescent
          body to which nothing so blinding can be compared
          except the sun, even though the anus is the night.
              — George Bataille

René Crevel clairvoyant boy
drank death in a chunk
of burning moon
heart lost the sky
american boy who wrapped his thighs around you
now dances in the infinity
of an open closet
in rainbow galalith panties
surrealist mouth pronouncing
fiery logos
& lights without passage
in the present
these dead streets where
the Wind won’t recussitate
permanent mechanical failure
in a civilization lost to
Wonder
is the red window of the
East where the
Angel shrieks
between the thighs of sailors
boys from the
Islands tremble
post-nuclear landscape where
black flower transfixes
Shadow

III.

          Je tuerai les rôdeurs silencieux de la nuit
              — René Crevel

a lunar body penetrates the
sea’s forward quarter
night immemorial where the
elements play
hawk, witch doctor boy
& for a thousand years
his dance celebrates the world
his laughter cuts the Island
into two pieces
fogrose in with
ghosts
boy body the Roman
Empire passed through
always where pirates sail,
turbid stars, bosquage,
telescopes

IV.

summer date with Satan
a cruise a dalliance
he orders a daquiri
he orders a black locomotive
to dive into the South
witch doctor boy in a blue burnoose
surrounded by mirrors of High Sorcery

V.

          Il m’apparut que l’homme est plein de dieux
          comme une éponge immergée en plein ciel.
              — Le Paysan de Paris, L. Aragon

eat your mushroom
in the heart of the sacred
making archaic signs
seek on beaches, mountains
& mangroves
the changing of shapes
dream the world one time only
the mushroom will show the way
only the predestined speak
the light the mushroom’s holytree
will take you to the river of images
Shadows dance in this Burning

VI.

          Viva resta la dolce
          persuasione di una fitta
          rete d’amore ad
          inquietare il mondo.
              — Sandro Penna

wing-rich
shaman boy
embodies the hawk
hears mountain light
strips and lies impassable on Earth
the Thighbone drum is his
& the most limpid star in his
head

VII.

          Le soleil et mon coeur
          sont de même matiére
              — Pierre Reverdy

the grand lilac reflection travels
the cream of angels
morning’s threatful flower
wind sweeping the landscape
for now i’m a lust-god
on destiny’s fragile parapet
the fog that takes me is horizontal

    — Ilha Comprida, 1993

•—•—•—•—•

One poem and the three final sequences from Cyclones (Nankin Editorial, SP, 1997). The first and third sequences were originally published in Kenning 10 (Spring 2001), ed. P.F. Durgin.

VII is simply how Piva spells 7 in this instance.