Inspired by the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca.
This flaming music
Cannot stop itself
Useless anyway!
The guitar sings of things
It dares not understand
The surly birds of a dead spring
Of bloody spades
And sinking sands
And cameliatic brands
This life without death
These pointless arrows
These wineless cups
This meeting without understanding
This whimless moon
These bullrings
Ringing endlessly
Why?
This herky-jerky journey between madness and content
In the slender strand of a lifetime,
This momentary fragment, when a step forward or back
Means obliteration, just kills me.
I mean I am a directionless wisp,
A whim of contingency.
I know, I know, it’s the speed, not the light,
It’s the memory, not the event, but still,
Can my consequence be detectable?
What is the worth of a single bubble, unique but common?
I have the same value as a single mote,
A quantum value.
I am the boson of this boat,
My captain has abdicated
In favor of probability.
What pops in also pops out,
What breeds continuity
Also bleeds continuity.
And yet, here we are, our helices entwined,
Our smear upon history irrevocable.
That shallow basin, barely discernible
– Just ignore it.
It’s your destiny.
If all is one,
Why do I torture myself
With Illusion?
If a child’s scream
Sears my heart
More than a mountain stream,
If the despair of love
Kills me more
Than the promise of Spring,
What good is redemption?
If the longing
Endlessly lingers
If the forlorn
Beg for my embrace
What use are tears?
Is there a kind of one
That means many?
Or an illusion
That means now?
How curious
That from boundless unity
I have built heaven and hell.
You are here
Where is your soul?
Behind those ancient mountains
So dreary unseen
Or what terror claims your heart
You cannot tell North from South?
Where does that thick reddish road
Lead to your left?
What cities await your slow withdrawal
Still urging still purging
Stillness
As yet unreached horizons
Clearly labelled
Just beyond the water
Are yours
You can’t reject them
Can you?
The clouds thickened and cracked the planks of heaven
Heaved overboard their burden
And crushed the green and brown spring in pale dunes
Robins puffed to pigeon size
Buds disappeared beneath white-laced wings
Of earth-shackled trees
No one about but Cossack girls
With speckled jeans and high boots
Pulled along on bright orange leashes
Their dogs resolute and patient
Sniffing remnants of bygone colleagues
And sprinkling messages in the snow
Long ago such snow shrouded mysteries
What was it I imagined?
All of life and death I suppose
All of longing all of waiting
All smothered ambivalence
All new and green erupting from stagnation
exiles child 