Over The Town - Marc Chagall / WikiArt

From When I’m Not Around (Quando não estou por perto).

I fall in love only with the furthest
landscape to narrow the eyes to
find the focus to focus for the last time
daytime flight of those wings
moments of scattering moments
to appease the focus to appease the view the disagreement
of the view I fall in love only with the far
landscape to recover the beginnings
continuations they were moments to
scatter choose objects that spread
inverse movement reverse
movement of the search for wings that circled
the mountain to find focus and follow I fall
in love only from here looking at the possibility of
the greater distance there where myopia defines my steps there
where I can contain myself contain the limits of this
body span of my slender arms
radius I trace from this merely geographic
center to narrow the eyes to find the
sudden focus vision of this daytime flight the limit
of myopia also the limitation of my steps there where they begin
continue steps in the blackness in the turbulence there
in the furthest landscape the view
disagreed with the possibility of what
they call passion of what
I fall in love with look scattered look focused only
on the furthest landscape

Annita Costa Malufe

Annita Costa Malufe is the author of seven books of poetry namely, Alguém que dorme na plateia vazia (Someone Who Sleeps in the Empty Audience), Um caderno para coisas práticas (A Notebook for Practical Things), Quando não estou por perto (When I'm Not Around,), Como se caísse devagar (As if Falling Slowly), Nesta cidade e abaixo de teus olhos (In this City and Below Your Eyes), and Fundos para dias de chuva (Backgrounds for Rainy Days). She is also the author of two books of essays: Dispersed Territories: The Poetics of Ana Cristina Cesar and Poetics of Immanence: Ana Cristina Cesar and Marcos Siscar, both with funding from the São Paulo Research Foundation. She is currently a researcher at the University of Salamanca. In Brazil, she is a Productivity in Research scholar at the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development and teaches in the graduate program of Literature and Literary Criticism at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP).

Janet Hendrickson

Janet Hendrickson translates from Spanish and Portuguese to English. Her experimental translation of Treasure of the Castilian or Spanish Language (New Directions, 2019), which turns a 1611 dictionary by Sebastián de Covarrubias into a series of prose poems, was longlisted for a PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She also translated The Future Is Not Ours (ed. Diego Trelles Paz, Open Letter, 2012), a generation-defining anthology of new Latin American fiction. She teaches writing and translation in Liberal Studies at NYU.