someone opens an orange

Someone opens an orange in silence
Herberto Helder

Someone opens an orange in silence, at the entrance
to fabled nights.
He plunges his thumbs down to where the orange
is rapidly thinking, where it grows, annihilates itself, and then
is born again. Someone is peeling a pear, eating
a bunch of grapes, devoting himself
to fruit. And I fashion a sharp-witted song
so as to understand.
I lean over busy hands, mouths,
tongues that devour their way through attention.
I would like to know how the fable of the nights
grows like this. How silence
swells, or is transformed with things. I write
a song in order to be intelligent about fruit
on the tongue, through subtle channels, unto
a dark emotion.

For love also gathers rinds
and the movement of the fingers
and the suspension of the mouth over the confusing
taste. Love also places itself at the gates
of ferocious nights
and tries to understand how they imagine its
alien power.
To annihilate fruit in order to know, against
the passion of taste, that the earth works its
solitude—is to devote oneself,
sucking dry the loved one so as to see how love
works in its madness.

A song of now will say that nights
crush
the heart. It will say that love approaches
eternity, or that taste
reveals unending rhythms, the secrets
of the dark.
For it is with names that someone knows
where a body is
through an idea, that a thought
can take the place of a tongue.
—It is with voices that silence wins.

translated from the Portuguese by Alexis Levitin