Madrigal to the Nuns of Santiago

The yellow-withered eucalyptus leaves rain down at dawn,

on the Promenade du Fer, where three young 

Carmelites from La Coruña

come upon the statue and the stake

I stand before, Rosalia’s tomb.

To a distant melody of gaitá,

the mischievous wind of the night lifts

long skirts above their ankles—

I know they know I’m aware of their breathing

and their breasts, heartbeats quickening

to see a stranger at this hour, a man

who stands between them and the stone poetess

they’ve come to confess to.  Even from

our distances, I feel their eyes follow me

as I pass beyond the olive hedge, into

black pines and palms of the garden below.

Each sets her lips to a taste of salt

and brushes a wisp of Andalusian hair,

as I look back and feel the burning ardor

of her vows, her search for the soul outside

the body, come blindly down upon me in a stroke.

Tomb of Orcabella

Along the Roman stonewall oxcart path to Insua,

we unearth a cairn from Duyo, namesake for

what breasts of San Guillermo's Hill are left,

where the tomb lies open-faced to winter winds. 

Along this coast of death—Quintana dos Mortos—

by the wolf's sepulchre suckling her, the witch first

drew my father out of her and breathed the cult

of sun that Pliny's fiery ankles felt, as he limped

the road to Mt. Vesuvius, to where he sketched

his map of overworld, while dreaming of

reincarnation.  Phaedra brings holocaust

to herdsmen from Atlantis, screaming out when

Quasimodo buys the cliff.  Today, blood tide

brings salt-cracked seals, oil-slimed petrels in,

the spill-wash terrors of this westernmost

utopos for bowmen.  Home of my third birth,

half-way around the world from where

the cockle swims to burn inside my lungs,

I sing you back to life, accursed captain, muse

of all, for the wound I won't seek succor for,

I ask a pardon for the tryst of guilt and gift. 

Wheat Field with Lark

A stand of salt-marsh grass swells as wind pushes past

a pond where grandfather frogs croak in dusk’s pall

over the valley—it’s both light and dark that

burst the spectrum into trillions of blues,

mottled by both burgundy and rose,

empurpled stalks of shadow’s onslaught.

All I hear is wind as it rakes clutches of fescue,

sod beneath wheat fields, and a hidden nest

from which a meadowlark alights, tonguing

foxtails, swerving up in a spiral of the fervored

dance of madness—to pierce the sky with its wings

and soak watermelon mountains with its afterlife. 

And then a single plaintive crying-out

is heard—a gesture of succumbing to the night.

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