1

When we were poets
everything counted,
each instrument spoke
hopefully melodic in its
least note of what
could scarcely be said
but had to because how else
to register the resonances-
those CDs on the sidewalk
in front of Atocha sold
by African immigrants
each one hauling as much
history as a train, and
every table past cool
April noonday doors
holding intimate talk
among its lunching
friends too familiar
maybe to be amazed
but seen by a stranger
nearly sacred in their
ritual transaction of routine-
every day
a dance of interplay
even automatic doors
might spread their wings
to allow the pedestrian
entry. 

2

Southbound, gliding newsless through a cloud-studded countryside,
Camus accusing me of complicity in consciousness and guilt,
passing through Joaquin Rodrigo’s turf, those transient groves
and gardens whose citrus scents have endured hundreds of years
in sound as echoes inside the hollows of skillfully touched
guitars, I drink with soft breaths the pink sweater of my seatmate
and wonder how it happens we’re here together, silent conspiring
travelers on a high-speed train, each of us inescapably connected
to what refuses to leave us alone even as we remain
solitary, singularly and separately aware or unaware of the
ruined factories and stripmined landscapes slipping past
faster than we can record them, only the slowly floating clouds
seeming to witness at leisure the existing greenness otherwise
unseen by the mesmerized, myself among them except for what
distinction I can wring from the occasional errant lamb
seen grazing alone between the electric substations and recurrent
tunnels through which we shoot as the terrain grows hillier, rockier
and the trees thicken in the increasingly Andalusian light.

3

A bronze bust of Cernuda
and his books are displayed
in the corner window of the Librería
Antonio Machado a few doors down from my room.
Wandering along the evening streets,
we’re one, wholly alone
amid the multitudes closing their shops
and gravitating toward favorite cafés
in groups whose talk competes with the noise
of motorscooters roaring homeward.
Rowers on the river from the rowing school
and big boats built for turistas float in the water
rhythmically just before sunset, tall thin girls
stroll strongly along the esplanade,
old men are walking their dogs,
the bells of dozens of churches
banging out the hour in slightly
staggered succession. How many
lonesome twilights he must have witnessed
in his adolescence, resolutely singular
despite the constant call of the collective.

4

An all-day drizzle
descends into midnight
sweat of flamenco
dancers smacking the
floor and carving the
dark red air with
sensuous severity,
arms are blades
at this pitch
of articulation
and feet are hammers
of impoverished pianos
abandoned in barren
landscapes during
droughts-only a
light rain remains
to remind the stranded
of what their hands
once savored, that
slippery olive-flavored
skin which defined a
shape that breathed
and shed some essence
that seemed to smoke
with fateful heat
nothing could save
you from-just like
this song, the slapping
tragedy of all these
hands which trace the
pain of what won’t
come back however many
tears slip between
however many grieving
dancers’ breasts or
caress the handsome
contours of cheekbones
or plunge riverward
in the soulful tones
of the aging matriarch
who knows where everything
went.

5

Huge magnolias hundreds of years old
with roots like claws of monsters gripping the ground
overhang the gardens where touristic litter
is scattered along the paths and oranges
drop casually from fragrant trees
to rot in time to my ancient footsteps
which seek a course beyond the dog-fouled cobblestones
and kitsch-filled shops in the guidebooked sidestreets
across a bridge to a plastic table
above the river where rowers glide
and friendly Gypsies serve gazpacho
and postcards are addressed to those back home
whose company I’d love if they were here.
Cernuda is my muse as I immerse myself
so strangely in his Sevilla,
his family home of a century ago
a glass shop now, its patio long since converted
to commerce, a ceramic plaque on the outside wall
commemorating the birthplace of the poet,
and the house on Air Street
where he wrote in his youth
now marked with a poem on painted tile
composed much later from memory
in exile-never at home,
destined to be alone down to the end
in Coyoacán where he died with his pipe
in his hand, slippers on his feet,
bathrobe wrapped around his aging body.
I held that pipe, his watch, his fountain pen
from which flowed Desolación de la quimera,
testimony to his final faith
in the oblivion awaiting everyone,
even the poet whose words reach vainly
toward a future that could scarcely care less-
only some equally possessed and solitary soul
might hopelessly attempt to rescue, through
translation, a voice doing its best to avoid dying.

6

Fierce rain rattles the skylights
of this overpriced hotel-
a lousy night for wandering the streets
from which I’ve returned to strip
and read Rilke in a bed too narrow
to accommodate even one person let alone
lovers. To be somewhere with nothing
to do is a test of one’s powers
of invention : how to create
out of useless idleness, something
more than boredom. You write,
which is how for a moment,
as in the arms of a partner,
you have the illusion of escaping
fate, which conversation also
serves to obscure-
and so the noise of voices
filling the bars and taverns
as if rendering some score, fortissimo,
to scare off oblivion. Even from here
you can almost hear the singers
on the other side of the river
the rain kept you from walking
across a bridge to witness.

7

Cold gray days so strangely stormy
pelting the April streets with icy
tears, and three or four cotton
turtlenecks subtly absorbing
the smells of scores of bars
whose kitchens exude essential
odors of countless appetites
mixed with tobacco smoke and the
private sweat I contribute-
just a few elements blending
a recipe for regret, that seventh
sense of what was missed
in the presence of so much else.
And yet the traces remain,
however unseen, as when, late
at night, I take off my shirt
and the smell of everything
the day dragged in comes loose
in a useless rush of recollection,
recapitulation of what escaped.

8

How many tongues do the stones speak,
having outlasted empires and endured
the indignities of tourism
and the indifference of dogs
who drop their eternal turds
amid the most elegant architecture imaginable.
Cernuda’s fountainous plant-filled patio
is now a shop, and dead bishops in the cathedral’s
catacombs are trampled by faithless
hordes whose flashes are forbidden
but whose cameras click on and on.
If only Rilke were here to record the transcendent
ironies of tchotchkes galore displayed to seduce
consumers, give them an Andalusian
illusion of having been here, souvenirs
of their (our, my) transparent transience
as we pretend to catch a trace of what passes.