I admire Ricardo Reis.
He had no brothers, only a cousin
who pretended to know what moved
the sensual soul who wrote in evaporates.

The rain never fell on his coffin
when at last the men pried his identity
away from Fernando Pessoa
and laid him too in the ground.

There he rests—Caeiro, Reis, and the third
persona of a poet who denied everything,
therefore creating everything for us
to enjoy again, as if for the first time.

We have become so jaded
even the sky greens at sunset.
The hills,metallic, meets the sea
to bathe in little dormitories.

In those rooms filled with circuits,
the J, the tit, and the cross shine from screens
until some of us wonder
whether we are truly women.

We count the minutes of our youth
and dismiss the years of our aging
as if it were pointless to be sad
about less attractive to the men we used to be.