“I have in me all the dreams in the world.”
– Fernando Pessoa
The light and humidity here are dark cherry chaser,
fire in the throat, tossed back and swallowed, absorbed
in the blood still boiling from another unchecked stroll
through a labyrinthine, Alfama night, drenched
in glimpse of stars—between stucco, between clay tiles,
between laundry barely stirring in a breeze barely moving
above—your sweat-damp hand suffusing my own with the heart
of what we might be–there, then, when I share those streets of my past
in the present of our futures—when met, after flights of this fantasy
travel finds feet on the earth. Lisboa is a city of travel–not a destination but a yawning
portal—all the old energies coalescing, converging, where two can be
privy to the secrets of voices rising and falling in Fado keys. Please.
Please be more than what we accept we are, in the coil, the dragon’s breath
of Spain giving shape to the sleepy shade of European life—an attitude, pretending
a city, pretending a dream, corked but alive inside ancient barrels, you and I
drinking vinho verde like sardines drink the salt-laden seas, begging fire
of cherries to burn away doubt, and reality, and giving ourselves, over and again,
to the Celestine truths swirling ruas, avenidas, sweeping us from placas into alleys
and the maelstrom of the magic of inner Lisboa. I say it again: Here, there be dragons,
and you and I, somewhere between the Scylla of its beauty, Charybdis of its sadness,
either of which could pluck and devour the heart while I cling to you in the madness
before I wake.
Before we wake.
Again
