Cantabria
The Feve to Cabezón de la Sal
Every
day it is the same:
the
train sways ungainly on its track,
the
hills hurtle by, the cattle graze,
the
gray river shrugs up a froth—
the
remainder skimmed off from our lives is stone slag,
the
grit that breaks loose
in
their collisions with history.
My
head lolls forward onto the window,
a
reflection that looks beyond itself,
a
body in motion that does not stir—
alluvium
gathers from the river, layer upon
layer
plastered up into hillocks that bulge
one
atop another like piled entrails
crushed
into the shelf of a rib:
heaped
dispersion. Enlacement:
each
instant of brightness clings in itself
to
find a name for its opposite—
days
are deposited into what they once were.
All
water is what it erodes.
The Road Above Carmona
Every year it is the same:
a
lone car purrs by on the thin band of asphalt,
rains
pound the dirt into mud,
the
cattle graze, the slopes froth slick with dew—
the
villagers carve spiked wooden clogs each winter and tramp
door
to door through the mire: the remainder is a house,
its
rooms filled and emptied out in the collusions of history.
Young
people set out first for the larger towns, then the cities.
The
stones that sheltered them remain where they are stacked,
bodies
that stir but are not in motion—
lives
extract themselves in deposits
like
alluvium hewn from its valley at the river’s passing,
dispersed
by years of wind and rain
until
they flare up into cowslip, thick grass and sky:
an
entanglement of limits. Unified departure:
each
balconied house adheres to its centuries,
grows
dense in its compression between the hills.
Valleys
open into that which they do not contain—
all
erosion is where the water went.
Para Tocar
I
They
took me up into the hills to make a din
with
our instruments and our half-guzzled
bottles,
crouched rag-tag in the lit mouth
of a cave, then abre la puerta niña
and
the city below atremble on the precipice of night,
at
once enlarging and falling away—
it
is only that we are so endlessly moored
in
this slatted carapace cluttered with organs and
who
knows what else: a lash
of
strange unbidden thirst must coil through us
and
tauten like lace, that we strive
for
such sounds, and croon in the wake
of
all that we are not.
II
First
the Jews left Madinat Garnata,
took
the keys to their empty houses
and
held them close aboard the ships and wagons
that
carried them away—
and
then the Muslims who lingered
were
bathed in the holy fonts or disappeared
into
the caves high above the city
to
sing the songs that remained to them
in
the time that they were given:
huddled
in a ring on the crest of those hills,
we
can begin to imagine untrammeled desire,
how
it pools from nothing to fill the rupture
of
distance and films idly
in
the suspended multiplicity of non-being,
but
we cannot prescind the body
from
the desire, and so we go about
stumbling
upon evidence—the grooves
worn
into a saddle of stone where we sit
by
the curtained cavern, the melismatic
tumble
of the voice in the shadow just
shy
of the candle’s lick—and we think
that
it must be a subtraction, that it is the body
walling
us off from the layered chorus
of
who else we might have been or
who
else we were,
and
that whatever stirs there above and below us
must
live only as much as it stings in its joints,
as
if the purity of its elocution is in
the
clean pitch of its breakage from us, the instant
when
we hurl the desire far enough beyond the body
that
we know it to be other than what we are,
and
it catches, a tarnished flake of silver
burrowed
into the dust of another alleyway,
the
dirt of another hill,
the
crossing of another ocean.
