That rain now is torrents on the roofs
of the village of Cifuentes, as a father and his sons
study a scrap of liturgy or song. Shattering
molars in the cold, an oatmeal death's head
vaguely oversees. Mierda. Misericordia.
No smarmy palette of Titian indigoes.
Father Alcazar, like Lear, reads in chill timbres
to the gathered penitents of a devil's pact,
as the painter's muses--Velasquez, nature, Rembrandt--
supervise, the willowy Greek-eyed boy
gazing up to a leak that spits drizzle
at the huddle of frowning men intent
to hear every bit of the will of St. John,
Lope de Vega, love letters to Martin Zapater,
ones with the scribbles of a bovine eye
upon Josefa's smirched bunghole.
So the world is weary, each child a presage
of what we failed at, or hope to achieve?
The pelt of the rain's steadier, now that I write
of the only image concerned with words.
Perhaps it's simpler said, this hermit reads
these poems to the group--such explains
the puzzled looks and uplift of each brow,
one last script to be written in old age,
a glossy epitaph for one who's ready to be
taken away, but can't yet say with his heart:
bury me in the desert surfcast by the sea;
don't seek my name--it's written in too
many portraits, upon a tomb subsumed by water.