Birds Are the Liveliest Fruit of Trees

Recently my Portuguese pal Paulo Dias Figueiredo introduced me to the work of Ruy Belo, a poet who Paulo claims is second only in 20th century Portuguese stature to the poet Fernando Pessoa (and I realize that I haven’t yet posted anything about Pessoa–I will soon). After reading a clutch of poems by Belo, translated by Richard Zenith at Poetry International Web, I have to agree.

The following poem reminds me of when I lived in the small village of Kosangbé in the Ivory Coast and mentioned once to a friend, San Kofi, as we were passing a batch of birds making a racket in a nearby tree, that those birds could really sing. Kofi shot me quite the startled look, and said “Birds don’t sing, they weep.” I had nothing to say in reply, still swept up in the thought that what I heard as joy, Kofi’s culture heard as sorrow.

That exchange stayed with me, and led me to the understanding that birds don’t sing or weep unless we say they do. And, apparently, birds are the liveliest fruit of a tree, because Ruy Belo says they are.

A FEW PROPOSITIONS WITH BIRDS AND TREES THAT
THE POET CONCLUDES WITH A REFERENCE TO THE HEART

RUY BELO

Birds are born on the tips of trees
The trees I see yield birds instead of fruit
Birds are the liveliest fruit of trees
Birds begin where trees end
Birds make the trees sing
On reaching the height of birds the trees swell and stir
passing from the vegetable to the animal kingdom
Like birds their leaves alight on the ground
when autumn quietly falls over the fields
I feel like saying that birds emanate from the trees
but I’ll leave that manner of speaking to the novelist
it’s complicated and doesn’t work in poetry
it still hasn’t been isolated from philosophy
I love trees especially those that yield birds
Who hangs them there on the branches?
Whose hand is it whose myriad hand?
I pass by and my heart’s not the same

Artist image: Birds and Trees, by Fred Tomaselli.

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April 12th, 2010 by admin

Perhaps There is a Light Inside People

When I lived in Lisbon I exchanged a few e-mails with the writer José Luís Peixoto, but somehow we never managed to meet; my loss, particularly since it has taken me a couple of years to read his marvelous novel The Implacable Order of Things, which won the José Saramago Prize in 2001.

The novel is set in the farmland of Portugal’s Alentejo region, a world of low sloping hills, cork and olive trees, golden wheat fields, and a relentless heat that Peixoto captures here nicely: “The earth was its own silence on fire. The sun was a blazing heat lighting up the flame-colored air: the aura of a fire that was the aura of the earth, that was the light and the sun.”

Alentejo landscape

It’s a world where “swallows fly close to the ground, like harmless volleys from a slingshot,” and where characters can live well past 100 years, as if baked into a sort of semi-immortal beef jerky by the Alentejo’s ever-present sun. Peixoto further peoples his novel with Siamese twins who are joined at the pinky, a brutal giant, a scheming sheepdog, a man with no right arm or leg who somehow manages as the town’s premier carpenter, a cook who sculpts her meals into elaborate landscapes, and an oracular voice locked in a hallway chest that seems to hypnotize some of the characters with pronouncements like “Perhaps there’s a light inside people, perhaps a clarity; perhaps people aren’t made of darkness, perhaps certainties are a breeze inside people, and perhaps people are the certainties they possess.”

These individual certainties, though, are almost never shared by the characters, who are unable to breach their invisible interior walls, and this lack of connection sets in place turns of fate that continue in the novel through not one but two generations.

Translated by Richard Zenith into a beautiful English that often rises to the rhythms of a desperate prayer, this novel’s accumulation of wisdoms lingers in my mind, particularly this hard truth: “We are granted our heart’s desire only for it to be definitively taken away, since our dream of it perishes.”

While I was reading Peixoto’s novel, I discovered by chance a Portuguese band that I have to confess to my shame I’d never noticed when living in Lisbon, A Naifa. Now I can’t stop listening to their music. They combine the traditions of fado with a contemporary, at times almost ambient rock sound, a strange brooding mixture of past and present. In many ways, the songs of their album “3 minutos antes de a maré encher” became the soundtrack for me of The Implacable Order of Things.

One of my favorite A Naifa songs is their heartbreaking “Todo o amor do mundo não foi suficiente” (“All the Love in the World Wasn’t Enough”). This video of the song is especially moving since it records one of the band’s last performances with their bassist, João Aguardela, who died too young of cancer in January 2009. Rest in peace, João.

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And here’s a strange note: when I finally met up with José Peixoto, at the Disquiet International Literary Conference in Lisbon, he told me that he had written the lyrics for A Naifa’s song “Todo o amor do undo não suficiente.”

Interested in more of Peixoto’s work? Read about his travel experiences in North Korea, in the post “The Kinship of Secrets.”

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January 3rd, 2010 by admin