your heart

[i carry your heart with me (i carry it in]

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go, my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

e.e. cummings, Complete Poems: 1904-1962, George J. Firmage (ed.), Liveright, 1994.

Etc.

enquanto (des)espero por isto,

[v]

my sweet old etcetera
aunt lucy during the recent

war could and what
is more did tell you just
what everybody was fighting

for,
my sister

isabel created hundreds
(and
hundreds)of socks not to
mention shirts fleaproof earwarmers

etcetera wristers etcetera, my
mother hoped that

i would die etcetera
bravely of course my father used
to become hoarse talking about how it was
a privilege if only he
could meanwhile my

self etcetera lay quietly
in the deep mud et

cetera
(dreaming,
et
        cetera, of
Your smile
eyes knees and of your Etcetera)


e. e. cummings, xix poemas, Assírio & Alvim, 1998.

i sing of Olaf glad and big
whose warmest heart recoiled at war:
a conscientious object-or

his wellbelovéd colonel(trig
westpointer most succinctly bred)
took erring Olaf soon in hand;
but--though an host of overjoyed
noncoms(first knocking on the head
him)do through icy waters roll
that helplessness which others stroke
with brushes recently employed
anent this muddy toiletbowl,
while kindred intellects evoke
allegiance per blunt instruments--
Olaf(being to all intents
a corpse and wanting any rag
upon what God unto him gave)
responds,without getting annoyed
"I will not kiss your fucking flag"

straightway the silver bird looked grave
(departing hurriedly to shave)

but--though all kinds of officers
(a yearning nation's blueeyed pride)
their passive prey did kick and curse
until for wear their clarion
voices and boots were much the worse,
and egged the firstclassprivates on
his rectum wickedly to tease
by means of skilfully applied
bayonets roasted hot with heat--
Olaf(upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
"there is some shit I will not eat"

our president,being of which
assertions duly notified
threw the yellowsonofabitch
into a dungeon,where he died

Christ(of His mercy infinite)
i pray to see;and Olaf,too

preponderatingly because
unless statistics lie he was
more brave than me:more blond than you.

e.e. cummings, Selected Poems, Richard S. Kennedy (ed.), Liveright, 2007.

5

"kitty". sixteen,5'1",white,prostitute.

ducking always the touch of must and shall,
whose slippery body is Death's littlest pal,

skilled in quick softness. Unspontaneous. cute.

the signal perfume of whose unrepute
focusses in the sweet slow animal
bottomless eyes importantly banal,

Kitty. a whore. Sixteen
you corking brute
amused from time to time by clever drolls
fearsomely who do keep their sunday flower.
The babybreasted broad "kitty" twice eight

—beer nothing,the lady'll have a whiskey-sour—

whose least amazing smile is the most great
common divisor of unequal souls.

e.e. cummings, Selected Poems, Richard S. Kennedy (ed.), Liveright, 2007.

4

Buffalo Bill's

defunct

who used to

ride a watersmooth-silver

stallion

and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat

Jesus



he was a handsome man

and what i want to know is

how do you like your blueeyed boy

Mister Death

e.e. cummings, Selected Poems, Richard S. Kennedy (ed.), Liveright, 2007.

5

along the brittle treacherous bright streets

of memory comes my heart singing like
an idiot whispering like drunken man

who(at a certain corner suddenly)meets
the tall policeman of my mind.

awake
being not asleep elsewhere our dreams began
which now are folded:but the year completes
his life as a forgotten prisoner

-"Ici?"-"Ah non mon chéri;il fait trop froid"-
they are gone:along these gardens moves a wind bringing
rain and leaves filling the air with fear
and sweetness....pauses. (Halfwhispering....halfsinging

stirs the always smiling chevaux de bois)

when you were in Paris we met here

e.e. cummings, Selected Poems, Richard S. Kennedy (ed.), Liveright, 2007.

Parte do meu manifesto

6

you shall above all things be glad and young
For if you're young,whatever life you wear

it will become you;and if you are glad
whatever's living will yourself become.
Girlboys may nothing more than boygirls need:
i can entirely her only love

whose any mystery makes every man's
flesh put space on;and his mind take off time

that you should ever think,may god forbid
and (in his mercy) your true lover spare:
for that way knowledge lies,the foetal grave
called progress,and negation's dead undoom.

I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance

e.e. cummings, Selected Poems, Richard S. Kennedy (ed.), Liveright, 2007.

A Verb, and Is

There are certain things in which one is unable to believe for the simple reason that he never ceases to feel them. Things of this sort - things which are always inside of us and which consequently will never be pushed of or away where we can begin thinking about them - are no longer things; they, and the us which they are, equals A Verb, and Is.

e.e. cummings, The Enormous Room, cap.9

Às vezes lembro-me deste passo do The Enormous Room. Nele e.e. cummings fala de um momento que corresponde a uma identificação perfeita com algumas coisas. Isto acontece com muito poucas coisas. Os nossos círculos são sempre restrictos. Mesmo os da nossa memória, a que fixa o reduto último dessa outra coisa que é o tudo-o-que-tenho-trago-comigo. Há depois o que guardamos sem saber que guardámos. O passageiro indesejado que se aloja no instinto, no subconsciente. Talvez. Mas cummings não estava a falar disto. Eu é que estou a falar disso. O que é tão fantástico neste passo de cummings é o facto de ele dizer que existem coisas em que não podemos acreditar porque não deixamos de as sentir (hence Borges, quando dizia que a poesia era uma coisa anterior à inteligência) e o facto de para cummings a identificação perfeita com uma coisa ser expressa por um verbo. Pertencer à acção. Penso que Wilde falou disto de outro modo, colateralmente, em "The Critic as an Artist", quando escreveu:

For out of ourselves we can never pass, nor can there be in creation what in the creator was not. Nay, I would say that the more objective a creation appears to be, the more subjective it really is. Shakespeare might have met Rosencratz and Guildenstern in the white streets of London, or seen the servicemen of rival houses bite their thumbs at each other in the open square; but Hamlet came out of his soul, and Romeo out of his passion. They were elements of his nature to which he gave visible form, impulses that stirred so strongly within him that he had, as it were perforce, to suffer them to realize their energy (…)

Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying and Other Essays, Penguin Books, 2010.

De "The Cubist Break-Up"

I
writhe and
grape of tortured

perspective
rasp and graze of splintered

normality
crackle and
sag
of planes clamors of
collision
collapse As

peacefully,
lifted
into the awful beauty
of sunset

the young city
putting off dimension with a blush
enters
the becoming garden of her agony

e.e. cummings, Selected Poems, Richard S. Kennedy (ed.), Liveright, 2007.

5

may my heart always be open to little birds

birds who are the secrets of living

whatever they sing is better than to know

and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry

and fearless and thirsty and supple

and even if it's sunday may i be wrong

for whenever men are right they are not young

and may myself do nothing usefully

and love yourself so more than truly

there's never been such a fool who could fail

pull all the sky over him with just one smile

e.e.cummings, Selected Poems, Richard S. Kennedy (ed.), Liveright, New York, 2007.

Bom dia

Prelude

into the strenuous briefness
Life:
handorgans and April,
darkness,friends

i charge laughing
Into the air-thin tints
of yellow dawn,
into the women-coloured twilight

i smilingly
glide. I
into the big vermilion departure
swing,sayingly;

(Do you think?)the
i do, word
is probably made
of roses & hello:

(of solongs and,ashes)

e.e.cummings, Selected Poems, Richard S. Kennedy (ed.), Liveright, New York, 2007.

this
forest pool
A so

of Black
er than est
if

Im
agines
more than life

must die to
merely
Know

e. e. cummings
95 poems
Liveright, 2002

So shy shy shy(and with a
look the very boldest man
can scarcely dare to meet no matter

how he'll try to try)

So wrong(wrong wrong)and with a
smile at which the rightest man
remembers there is such a thing

as spring and wonders why

So gay gay gay and with a
wisdom not the wisest man
will partly understand(although

the wisest man am i)

So young young young and with a
something makes the oldest man
(whoever he may be) the only

man who'll never die


e. e. cummings

______to stand(alone)in some

____ autumnal afternoon:
___ breathing a fatal
__ stillness;while

_ enormous this how

_patient creature(who's
never by never robbed of
_day)puts always on by always

_ dream,is to

___taste
____not(beyond
_____death and

______life)imaginable mysteries


e. e. cummings, 95 poems
Liveright, 2002

somewhere i haver never travelled

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

e.e. cummings, xix poemas, Jorge Fazenda Lourenço (selecção, tradução e notas), Assírio & Alvim, 1998.

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

e. e. cummings, is 5 (1926)