Pessoa’s Tobacco Shop

Fernando sends one reeling from line to line, and often within his long single lines too.

         First 3 - 4 readings of the third stanza’s opening failed to grip, just like it did on the 4 - 5th reading:

          “Today I’m defeated, as if I learned the truth.”

         (The Reprobate unexpectedly approaching in the little park beside City Plaza this afternoon, by the stagnant Geylang River where he’d never been encountered before, had that kind of knowledge inscribed on his upturned face when he came up close for Hallo.)

         Pessoa’s street is “Real, impossibly real, certain, unknowingly certain.”

         The reader reeling down those cobblestones with that overpowering sense on that particular day of all days.

         And the familiar street outside his window mounted on wheels like a theatre-set about to be transported to the back-lot asphalt; Signalman’s whistle shrieking in his head like a piercing kettle; like a death knell in the courtyard of a church.

         A reader left gasping at the thinness of the daily scene, some days.

         Living in the tension between the real and the dream-like in the end lines of the first page in this poem.

         Sometimes a single poem can open a door to a new, unfamiliar writer.

         Not often one can read poetry before 6AM.

         (Earlier in the week a competition winning poem at a prominent US lit. journal had begun on the right hand side of the page and progressively angled down leftward like a thunderbolt in a child’s drawing; two French words included in the short lines.)

NB. Fernando Pessoa & Co. transl. by Robert Zenith; “The Tobacco Shop,” p. 173