(in memoriam Nancy Cunard, 1896-1965)
Twenty years on, and gone, down under snow and sand.
Whereabouts is the mill? And whereabouts was the mill?
The old men seem to know but language fails them,
even their canes and straw hats are monolingual.
The younger men don’t seem to know,
would be disinclined to encouragement if they did.
They’d much prefer that I linger someplace ending with a bill,
and even then, not linger overlong.
What is the meaning of the mill?
A place of execution, where the prisoners were shot
on suspicion of Communist affiliation.
Two men, a boy, and a woman.
Ricardo, Felix, Juan, and Mercedes.
The ocean runs green towards the north,
unfurling and rolling from the suave black world gathered
south of the promontory, the natural towers of stone
like a pace of lighthouses conspiring beside dead waters.
Pale, celestial, deep, the blue sky hordes
and dilutes, and looking at it from the shade,
here where the asphalt runs into gritty colorlessness
between the bright yellow houses, it seems to contain
every answer to every question, though one must look elsewhere
for the key.
If I speak of the martyrs as friends,
speaking their names as if innocence were not so far-fetched,
what good might it do? It isn’t good I intend,
nor dialogue, nor a defense of bad times and necessary murders.
In my mind is a germ that wishes to survive.
A cherub-faced waiter brings coasters to replace the damp ones,
a nice touch in this world of slow frugality.
Cardboard wafers showing camels and waterwheels and a palm tree
that could be sister to the one we sit beneath.
I show my respect by holding my tongue, civility measured out in silences.
Look around, make no sudden movements,
drain expression from your eyes,
make no comment that might require pressing.
My heart is a compass pointing down.
Coral-colored shirt, dampened with sweat,
the cling and revelation of a Pickford waist.
Plum-plucking teen, snailed in a Galician field of garish yellow.
Her hair, deluxe as black Iguassu
when in the rare shade, or restrained
into a ball of black melon in the sunlight of a stranger’s orchard.
What is the price of a ticket from one world to the next?
What is the impromptu spell
whereby the elaborate net is coaxed
to misbehave and disobey?
For an hour clouds have been piling up behind the mountain,
coloring the seaward slope like a lava-flow of shadow.
My mind is barren of metaphor, the filling sky reveals
no swan’s neck, no quilt-edged anvil, no Lopokovan backside.
Half a glass of iced red wine later, I glance again and fancy now
the spreading cap of Ygdrasil, a pear of flawless snow,
an indention that hints of parapet where, too distant to be seen,
perhaps Lord Priam gazes down upon Achilles slaughtering the future.