There.

Wyeth, Jamie, Sea Watchers (study), 2009

DISCONTINUOUS POEMS

The frightful reality of things
Is my everyday discovery.
Each thing is what it is.
How can I explain to anyone how much
I rejoice over this, and find it enough?

To be whole, it is enough to exist.

I have written quite a number of poems
And may write many more, of course.
Each poem of mine explains it,
Though all my poems are different,
Because each thing that exists is always proclaiming it.

Sometimes I busy myself with watching a stone,
I don't begin thinking whether it feels.
I don't force myself to call it my sister,

But I enjoy it because of its being a stone,
I enjoy it because it feels nothing,
I enjoy it because it is not at all related to me.

At times I also hear the wind blow by
And find that merely to hear the wind blow makes
          it worth having been born.

I don't know what others will think who read this;
But I find it must be good because I think it
         without effort,
And without the idea of others hearing me think,
Because I think it without thoughts,
Because I say it as my words say it.

Once they called me a materialist poet
And I admired myself because I never thought
That I might be called by any name at all.
I am not even a poet: I see.
If what I write has any value, it is not I who am
        valuable.
The value is there, in my verses.
All this has nothing whatever to do with any will
       of mine.

Fernando Passoa

Vividly.

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality.  I've written sentences whose sound, read out loud or silently, impossible to hide their sound, can only be of something that acquired absolute exteriority and a full-fledged soul. As I walk, I construct perfect sentences that I cannot remember later at home. I don’t know if the ineffable poetry of those sentences derived from what they were or from their never having been.

Fernando Passoa

See.

de Blaas, A Young Woman with Veil (detail), 1909

From my village I see as much of the universe as can be seen

from the earth,

And so my village is as large as any town,

For I am the size of what I see

And not the size of my height . . .

In the cities life is smaller

Than here in my house on top of this hill.

The big buildings of cities lock up the view,

They hide the horizon, pulling our gaze far away from the

open sky.

They make us small, for they take away all the vastness our

eyes can see,

And they make us poor, for our only wealth is seeing.

Fernando Passoa

Beyond.

I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer.   I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live.  I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be.  Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to me to be full of poetry.  I only ever desired what was beyond my imaginings.

Fernando Passoa, from The Book of Disquiet

Be.

To know nothing about yourself is to live.

To know yourself badly is to think.

To have opinions is to sell out to yourself.

To have no opinions is to exist.

To have every opinion is to be a poet.

Fernando Passoa

All.

To be great, be whole: don’t exaggerate
Or leave out any part of you.
Be complete in each thing. Put all you are
Into the least of your acts.
So too in each lake, with its lofty life,

The whole moon.

Fernando Pessoa