Quiet Creature on the Corner

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A dark broth running from my hands beneath the faucet: I’d lost my job, and was saying so long to all that stubborn grease.

A dark broth running, there went three months, and I’d gotten into the habit of killing time by rambling through the center of town, a slight malaise if I saw myself in the mirror of a public bathroom, nothing a nineteen-year-old guy couldn’t shake by sticking with it a little longer.

Sometimes, right up until I sidled into one of the job lines, I’d pull out any old piece of paper from my pocket along with a pen, and if someone saw me I’d put on a stern air, like I was taking note, not of some verses that sprang to mind, but of a reminder of some urgent obligation.

Through the center of Porto Alegre, without much variation, I’d stroll a bit through Rua da Praia, have a coffee in the Galeria Chaves, hit the newspaper stand in the Praça da Alfândega, leafing, leafing, all the way up to Riachuelo, pop into a used bookstore, spend some more time leafing, poetry, too flat broke to buy even used books, money down near zero — and oftentimes, like now, I’d go sit in the public library up the street from the used bookstore, taking in the lives of poets, every one of them stranger than the last — there was one who was never looking to get laid, had never fucked anybody, died like that, chaste, and another who secretly collected his own fingernail clippings, he’d stick the clippings in a small jar and make a sort of relic of them, struck by some feeling he never knew how to decipher.

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