John Mateer

On the pillow John Mateer’s sleepy head
is a goldfish bowl aswirl with Venetian water,
and on that galleon, that luminous toy,
he is at the helm, telescope to his eye,
swearing he can’t see Australia.
And when his caravel glides into the Tagus,
as poised and cerebral as a black swan,
he calls for a glass of port and a pastel de nata,
then takes to his bed in a quiet hotel in Alfama,
and dreams the dream:
that one day there will be a poet
named John Mateer, just as there was once,
off the edge of maps, a monster
called Australia.

There is the idea of the perfect colony;
for instance, Saint Augustine’s City of God.
Then there is the Empire of Nostalgia,
inhabited by inebriated poets,
its laneways and tiny late-night bars
manifold and luminous as the cells of a brain.
In the case of Portugal, there is another
dominion, of pleasures unnoticed.
The only evidence of its persistence
those golden stars dimly aglow
on countless café tables, timidly
blinking in the cave of the Universe.
Yes, we have Bartolomeu Dias and Pedro Álvares Cabral,
but more important are the pastéis de Belém of decolonization.

We would expect families to be living in the crypts,
so many are small stone houses with painted doors and curtained windows,
the coffins mirror-smooth and on bunks along two walls,
and there are fewer than have been abandoned
on any street in an actual city. Through one grimy window
I see a shelf like a mantelpiece with framed photos
of a woman as a child and as a teenager and then of her as a bridesmaid.
On the clean floor there’s a line of yellow teddy-bears
and in a darkened corner, encircled by fallen petals, a vase of roses.
Why am I looking in on this sadness? In another crypt,
across from the grey dusty coffins, broken shelves;
and in another, a monochrome studio-portrait of the entire family
as would be hung with pride above a matriarch’s bed.
Why am I weeping again as I never do in my adopted country?
Why, as I am wandering the streets of memorial homes and cenotaphs,
hiding in the shade of Cyprus trees charred by the noon sun?
When I cross paths with the three old women bundled in their black,
they don’t murmur Bom dia. To them I am less than the dead,
not even a curator of remains, not even a ghost-writer – a tourist.
I’m sick of this. I can’t stop weeping.

Impulsively I want to turn to Luis de Camões,
who is elsewhere, and ask: What’s Canto Nine?
All those lonely young women, perfumed and frisky, awaiting
the mariners returning from a world half-known?
Why a dreamy brothel like those promised in the apocryphal sastras,
full of teens with teased-out hair and spy-tv eyes,
whose virginities can be reliably renewed by a pill swollowed the morning after?
Why the advertising? I hope it’s not Tristan da Cunha,
the isle of my great-grandmother’s birth! I have stood
between Vasco da Gama’s sarcophagus and yours, National Poet,
in Mosteiro dos Jerónimos, hearing your epic recited,
and I’ve sat on a bench in your praça staring up at your gargantuan silhouette,
your arms down resisting a salute, head clamped under a bronze laurel wreath,
and I have also dreamed of visiting those padrãos that dot the African coast,
those gravestones that marked your transportation to The East,
not wanting to question the motivations of a tragic actor.
But with Canto Nine I am again a tentative student,
confused, self-doubting, seeking the nod of The Author
as I page back and forth through the paperback,
praying that not all history must end in the purple-haze of porn.