Missing Bebel

To miss Bebel

You must first cross arid plains

And exhaust all water you have carried

Through lands blasted by light and heat

Where all color the sun has dried,

Evacuated, on an earth left brown

And sere and drizzled merely with the droplets

You might manage to extrude

Of precious sweat.



To miss Bebel

You must first cross the places

Where crosses have been struck in places

In homage to those who have travelled elsewhere.


Not Crusaders on a Mediterranean rampage,

Though some readers might imagine that,

Nor Maltese Arabs, Maltese Dogs, speaking

Phoenician tongues now spelt in a Roman Alphabet.


To miss Bebel

You must first divorce yourself from Bebel:

To separate from her eyelids, her eyelashes,

Her piercing look when the moon is at half-quarter.

From her voice through your ears when the stars

Seem so close to hand that they speak to you

Through her voice, husky and dark,

That you would turn to her voice

Expecting to touch it.


To miss her speech.

The last things she said

and how she said them.



To miss Bebel

You must first remember all this:

The woman who said all this,

who one day touched my arm to do all this

And how I thought

Better to forget all this,

having placed it in memory.

Not to know ever that it should return.


To miss Bebel

you must forget who you are

as you step up the steps

to relinquish your superfluous

superannuated self;


In Byzantium, in Jerusalem,

in Rio de Janeiro

And enter the portaria sem bater

the better to press the button on the car

That would take you to her floor.


The better to see Bebel

and to miss her

all over again

from the very beginning,

the point where she is ever to be found.