A Note to Alvaro

You can be happy in Australia as long as you don’t go there.

—Alvaro de Campos, June 4, 1931

A poem is a clear defiant thing

and what you wrote in 1931

sounds funny from a naval engineer

who never saw the place where I was born.

You lacked a certain gravitas and calm

unlike your captain friend Pierre Loti.

Yours is a sad bewildered poem.

My home town was pretty much like yours,

a great port on the sea lanes of the world.

I remember the liners, the merchant ships, the yachts,

the wailing of the sirens, the swooping cries of gulls

and fishing boats at morning round the wharves,

the hidden melodies of sea and sky.

Imagined places might be best of all,

perhaps that is what you were saying.

Geography is destiny I’ve heard.

We do not choose the place where we are born.

Vivian Smith