Auguries of Innocence

Patti Smith

Ecco

2005

80 páginas

2h 40m

ISBN-10: 0060832665

Auguries of Innocence is the first book of poetry from Patti Smith in more than a decade. It marks a major accomplishment from a poet and performer who has inscribed her vision of our world in powerful anthems, ballads, and lyrics. In this intimate and searing collection of poems, Smith joins in that great tradition of troubadours, journeymen, wordsmiths, and artists who respond to the world around them in fresh and original language. Her influences are eclectic and striking: Blake, Rimbaud, Picasso, Arbus, and Johnny Appleseed. Smith is an American original; her poems are oracles for our times.

Resenhas (1)

4 (Muito bom)

Written by a lake

"New Year’s Day. Rain. Two candles light the room where they sleep. She confesses. This is where she weeps. She is the cause of the rain. She could not stop weeping and the sky obliged to follow.

(How is it mapped? What is the refrain? Why must the sky follow?) The heart drops in the center of an inexhaustible lake. How light the heart appears, yet how weighty a thing. A powerful stone carved in the shape of an organ with chambers pumping. How slick a shadow it leaks as its signature. Sticky, oxblood, the colour of new shoes. High toppped, gold laced and worn with expectations poised to ride out life on horseback. Racing from hill to hill with humour, horror, bit of Spanish stitched on leaves.

The work wrung with this cry. Look you radiant wash yard. The sheets billow. Their wet folds tell a tale. Once there was a girl who walked straight, yet she was truly lame. She walked upright in new boots, yet I tell you her feet were bare. She lives forever, yet she lies buried in a vault of fertile air.

New Year’s Day. The wicks twist. The insistent mirror winks. An eye with time as her lashes. And if he-slipping at last, face pressed against the glass, releasing beads of spittle from parting lips-should suddenly speak, what would he say? And if she, shaken from her torpor, should rise to write, what would she write? Their table is laid with the promise of the lake. Water sighs for want of blood. These remains, malleable ash, are nothing. Signs for want of substance. A sack of sticks spilling order upon the surface. Words traced on a slab hewn from another forested mind.

a postscript prefiguring

Your finger press the door triggering a spring exposing the hard corner where you have walked. You shall not stumble. Offering a first encasing rivets extracted from the wet pout of this time or that. Prick the hour’s hand with nothing but eyes. Think nothing of it. For what remains to flush is nothing but salt jamming the mechanism of formal delights of, former misery. Nothing but salt to bundle and fling over a shoulder. Nothing but clumps of salt to toss, years later, like dice across a board of glass where you’ll sit on a ledge circling a glowing body, unfastening the dressings of a burden gone. The cremation of all my sorrow-may you spread the singed grains with your fingers, and without thought brush them aside.

Thus free to drown in sorrow of your own, may you sit in the shadows of our lost life, immersed in stillness, flanked by translucent hills, one a mountain coated immaculate and ringed at the throat with beads of cloud.

These words were written by a lake.

String them around a wrist. Do not grip a sword or draw what might be drawn, for wisdom is a dying bird, engraved on a palm. Next to nothing. And these words were written by a lake, before being as being was scripted and dealt. A pack of lives, each with a winning face, each with this blushing command.

Prick this. This moment the hand is free."