Honorable Mention, Samuel Washington Allen Prize, selected by Charles Coe
Letter to Anand from Sacatar
My dear Anand: Era quase a última noite
da nossa convivência aqui—almost the last evening
of our weeks at Sacatar, esse paraíso de artistas,
and your face was gathering storm clouds
from the winter sky’s chill and waning moon,
the tropic constellations arching over Itaparica.
But there was no time tonight to dwell
in the house of endings, or huddle together
on the breakwater to talk of years—shadows
drifting infinitely ahead—time only to walk to town
to help our other friends with their own departures.
In Muito Mais Hotel’s tiny sitting room
Makeda was filling out the registry book,
her backpack that you had carried here for her
already in the room she was renting.
Veronica was sashaying around the parlor
like she owned the place, still pleased
with her performance triumph that afternoon
and Makeda as one of the dancers—the slow,
sinuous processional of white-draped,
blue-painted Black women from studio altar-piece
to beach to cais, that narrow pier spanning
the tidal stream; and you knee-deep in the current
with your one good camera to photograph it all
for her. A fellow-artist’s favor.
But now everyone was speaking English—
a ripple of blurred syllables that eddied
you out. You paced the drab room, a current
of restless phrases under your breath.
I missed your words but whispered, “Tem
paciência, a gente vai logo embora: Patience,
friend, we’ll be going soon.” We’ll return
to your language, the tidal swells
of familiar address that include you.
But I was speaking English, too: I wanted
to understand Makeda—young woman
who backpacked around the continent by herself
as I had at that age. How was it to push such boundaries
for her, daughter of a conservative Creole family
in Tobago? How did she negotiate her safety?
You paced the corridor. Then, like your Tupi Nambá
ancestors melting back into the Mata Atlántica
—coastal forest almost vanished except within yourself—
you were gone. We heard a man’s shout outside.
Veronica and Makeda looked at each other and shrugged.
I crossed the patio to the locked iron gate but
by the time I struggled the rusted deadbolt open
there was no one on the shadowed evening street.
Dangerous for women to walk the streets at night alone,
our hosts had told us, even in that half-deserted
island town, but what else to do? Veronica and I
left Makeda to her rented room and walked back
to Sacatar, asking each other what had happened.
At the quintal gate, the guard told us
you were in the hammock—the same one
under my studio where you’d slipped away
for half an hour during lunch, and returned
to the table with your face that betrayed
nothing. You told me a few days later—
you wanted nobody to see your sorrow,
your saudade, for our residency’s end.
The hammock empty, I came upon you
in the kitchen, slicing a yellow globe
of passionfruit in half, juice of maracujá
pooling in its saucer. You heated maniçoba
with rice, your plateful of the evening meal
we all had missed.
“Me desculpe, Poeta,”
you said, your first words when you saw me.
“I’m sorry.” Across the kitchen
you gave me a look I’d never seen before,
some intricate risk uncoiling in its corner.
What were my first words? Only two more days
here, I had to choose carefully, even more
than my usual struggle for the right
swerves and signals in your language.
“Você também poderia ter estado em perigo“—
“You might have been in danger, too,” I offered
—my clumsy struggle with conditionals—
“walking back alone.” That private rainstorm
in your face. What did you think of us
as you walked back, I wanted to ask, what
did you think of yourself? I asked myself
what I felt—not anger—I wanted to understand
every turn and nuance of this moment.
“Did you hear what I shouted?” you asked,
as you filled another plate with the leftover
stew of salt-meat and rice—rough mess
eaten in secret by slaves on the run
and forest dwellers who gave them shelter
in the days of empire before there was a country.
Every dish in this culture with its resonance
of blood. “I heard a man call out,” I said,
“but I couldn’t understand the words.”
“Ainda bem,” you murmured, with a rueful
smile: Just as well. You offered me the warmed
plate and I took it from your hands: even
in that raw moment, just standing with you
in the late-night kitchen—wind rising outside
and waves of the maré alta slapping the breakwater
beyond the open windows’ pools of light—
was a pleasure I let the tide within myself
stream through and fill.
We carried our plates to the dining table
and then Veronica walked in, flumped into
the chair across from you: “Why?” she demanded.
You scowled at a point between the rattan placemats
and said nothing. Sitting between you both
at the table’s end, I listened as Veronica wove
a weft of questions amidst a warp of speculations
in her British boarding-school-by-way-of-Lagos
accent: even to my post-colonial native speaker’s ears
untranslatable. A strung-shell and beaded curtain
of words for you, impenetrable as the masks of dancers
in sacred spaces manifesting attributes of Orixás
—spirits and forces of nature that guide our lives—
human faces hidden so as not to distract
the worshippers.
“Traduza, Poeta, por favor,”
you muttered, and I tried to cut through
the convolutions: “Ela quer saber porque
você nos deixou lá e voltou aqui sozinho,
she wants to know why you left us there
and came back by yourself.” You frowned—
“Não quero falar com ela. Tell her, Poeta,
I’m sick and tired of this.” And she: “Tell him,
please, I don’t understand why he left us.”
Both of you glowering at each other and talking
about the other in third person.
Sitting between you, trying to soften
the edges, I felt my powers of diplomacy
falter. Only two days remaining, I was afraid
of revelations I might fall into, like a hunter’s
staked pit under floresta foliage camouflage.
Finally Veronica pushed her chair back—
“You two can sort this out, I’m going back
to work.” She breezed off, head high
as if she were decked out for Carnaval
with a retinue of courtiers bearing aloft
the train of her spangled royal gown.
You watched her go, then turned back
to me, a swirl of expressions in your face.
“Not you, Poeta, but they used me. That Makeda—
she wheedled me into carrying her pack, then
didn’t have the courtesy to speak to me in a language
I could understand. If it’s too much for her,
why did she bring it in the first place?”
You pushed your plate aside and jabbed a spoon
into the glass of seed-pulp I’d watched you scoop
from the golden halves of passion fruit.
“And Veronica, last week she was all, like,
cheia de dedos“—you stood up and imitated her
simpering and flirting—”trying to sweet-talk me
into documenting her performance, and like a fool
I said Yes. And now she wants to use those photos
and not give me credit.” “Or pay you,” I added.
You grimaced and sat down. “Eu sinto vergonha, Poeta,”
you murmured, “e raiva. I’m angry and ashamed.”
I watched the emotions pass across your face
—rain clouds scudding over the lunar eclipse—
then you winced and shifted in your seat.
What gave me permission at that late hour to rise
and stand behind you, moving your long hair aside
to rub your bony shoulders till the musculature
finally relented? Was this the most dangerous moment?
“Não se preocupe, não vai acontecer nada—no
worries, nothing’s going to happen,” I said,
as you tensed again.
This was not the cafuné
of lovers, their fingers stroking the beloved’s hair.
My goal that moment was simple—if you could ease
into the evening, coastal winds circling the thick
walls of the casarão, the big house silent with sleepers
in the farther rooms—I too could rest.
There was nothing more to say that moment
but we didn’t want to leave, so we washed our plates
and slipped outside, through the fanned shadows
of traveler’s palms, the heavy creak of the gate,
the last flick of dune grass over our feet
—to the intertidal line that, if we crossed it,
there would be no going back.
How could I translate our caution with each other,
the circumspection we never ventured to express—
both of us cross-legged on the fragile cais, or hugging
our own knees above the tidal flux, gazing into
winter mist over the bay, lit only by the pulse
of beams from the refineries across the channel
—with no idea how this story would continue.
Remember the night a full moon-cycle earlier
when we stood by the seawall and I was overcome
by vertigo and words I could not utter?
You put one arm around me and sang the hymn
to Oxum, goddess of sweet and salt seawater—presente
na água doce, presente na água salgada, e toda cidade
é d’Oxum—that hymn to Salvador, your city.
Of all the hymns that flow from the sacred spaces
how did you guess I could almost sing this one?
A força que mora n’água não faz distinção de cor—
the force that dwells in water and makes
no distinction of color between us.
We stood like that till I regained my balance,
finished the hymn, then sat again and gazed out
into darkness to talk of what mattered in our lives.
I murmured the word friendship, amizade, and you
replied quietly, not looking at me: amor.
Carolyne Wright
Carolyne Wright’s most recent books are Masquerade, a memoir in poetry (Lost Horse Press, 2021), and This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems (Lost Horse, 2017), whose title poem won a Pushcart Prize and also appeared in The Best American Poetry 2009; and the anthology, Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace (Lost Horse, 2015), received ten Pushcart Prize nominations. Carolyne has five earlier books of poetry, a volume of essays, and five award-winning volumes in translation from Spanish and Bengali. A Contributing Editor for the Pushcart Prizes, she teaches for Seattle’s Richard Hugo House. Carolyne lived in Chile and traveled in Brazil on a Fulbright Grant; and she returned to Brazil in 2018 on an Instituto Sacatar artists residency in Bahia. She has also received NEA and 4Culture grants, and a Fulbright Scholar Award to Brazil received in early 2020 and delayed by Covid took her back to Salvador, Bahia, in June and July 2022, and for another two months in 2023.