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    Saudade
    Saudade
    Saudade
    Ebook126 pages56 minutes

    Saudade

    By Traci Brimhall

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    About this ebook

  • Brimhall’s poetry has been featured in The New Yorker, Slate, Best American Poetry, and PBS Newshour—so wide public appeal.

  • Fascinating, unique, unexamined subject—an investigation into and narrative of the legends and strange happenings of an Amazon River town, and of the people and historical situations there.

  • Subject matter of book intricately connected to author’s intriguing family story.



    • LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCopper Canyon Press
    Release dateMay 1, 2018
    ISBN9781619321823
    Saudade

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      Book preview

      Saudade - Traci Brimhall

      The Last Time I Saw My Daughter’s Eyes, They Were on the Back of a Moth’s Wings

      I’m almost ready to give her up for dead. I tried

      believing she’ll appear someday on a boat from

      downriver where she’s been making a living

      as a dancer who glues yellow feathers to her breasts

      and lets tourists eat maracujá from her navel.

      I tried the easier faith of a gift-bearing God who

      serves the whim of prayer, but all I got was this

      ambitious hope, this heart that hangs upside down

      in my ribs, blind and nocturnal and a glutton for fruit.

      In a past life, I drowned with a rattlesnake wrapped

      around my ankle. In another one, I danced for

      a father’s obedience. In this one, I throw a rope over

      a ceiling beam and let it dangle over my bed. Its abiding

      creak rocks me to sleep where John the Baptist comes

      for me with a basilisk on his shoulders, calls me

      by my maiden name, and says: You have been weighed

      and measured and found wanting stilettos and a lipstick

      named Prima Donna. It’s not true, I try to say,

      but each letter carves itself into a tree and holds

      its blackness like a mirror. I see myself in every word,

      only younger. I wake as libidinous and sincere

      as Caruso in the morning lamenting his lost horse

      on a Victrola. The rope above my bed is gone

      and John the Baptist’s head sits on my chest

      like a wish seeking entrance to a well. Where is she?

      I ask, turning his head over in my hands three times.

      He opens his mouth to let down the flood.

      The Last Known Sighting of the Mapinguari

      Before she died, my mother told me

      I’d make the monster that would kill me,

      but what crawled toward me was not

      my lost daughter manifesting as myth —

      this was someone else’s death creeping

      through my field, butchering my cow.

      I recognized its lone eye and two mouths.

      Perhaps it mistook the lowing for the call

      of its own kind. I didn’t mind the heifer,

      but her calf circled, refusing to leave even

      as the creature pulled out its mother’s tongue,

      fed one of its mouths and moaned

      from the other. The intestines glowed

      dully in the moonlight. The calf bawled.

      The disappointed mapinguari sat,

      thousands of worms rising from the split

      heart it held, testing the strange night air.

      I’ve outlived all the miracles that came for me.

      My mother was wrong and not wrong,

      like the calf who approached the monster

      and licked the blood from its fingers.

      The Unconfirmed Miracles at Puraquequara

      First came reports of a leprous child who touched

      the shrunken hand and was healed. A barren

      woman pressed it to her womb and conceived.

      Other claims followed — a manioc crop flourished

      when a farmer danced the hand over his field,

      a priest cast out a possessed boy’s demon when

      he used a finger to make the sign of the cross

      on the boy’s body. Whenever a believer paraded it

      down church aisles, the square holes in Christ’s wrists

      closed. The man who discovered the shrunken fist

      in the mouth of a dead jaguar said his manhood

      doubled in size. I knew where it had come from,

      this message that my daughter’s body was still alive

      and surely growing, but I said nothing. The town

      had waited so long for a miracle, and it was finally

      here, enriching the poor, emboldening the meek,

      carving acrostic mysteries into the trees. So when

      I caught it trying to escape the reliquary, I thought

      I had no choice but to leash it to the altar. That’s when

      the manioc crop molded and the woman delivered

      a stillbirth with flippers for feet and eyes

      like small black planets. Demons returned to the boy.

      He shook so hard he struck his head on a rock and died.

      When the hunter went mad and strangled his wife, the whole

      town was relieved. We knew what to do. We paraded him

      to the city square where he wept — Where’s my wife? —

      as the priest prayed — Deliver us — and we all shouted —

      Thief! — until his body stopped swaying and we cut

      off his hands. Startled pigeons roosting on the church

      roof took flight when they heard the clapping.

      To Survive the Revolution

      I, too, love the devil. He comes to my bed

      all wrath and blessing and, wearing

      my husband’s beard, whispers, Tell me who

      you suspect. He fools me the same way every time,

      but never punishes me the same way twice.

      I don’t remember who I give him but he says

      I have the instinct for red. Kiss red. Pleasure red.

      Red of

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