Strains of Gaelic in the green hills, Ossian's
fen-sucked moorhen digs or deep Managuan lakes
rupturing out of Pleistocene,
fled over time through
a 1980s revolution back
to the shores of Spain.
This countryside, encyclopedia
of untoward accidents, a thin ice bridge
to circumvent the past, and
redesign the damask of the rose.
Here three Fates spin gauze
about a fallen matriarch--or is it
Priapus, fashioned out
of river mud and sneering--
who's got a finger in her cunt
to check if it's warm or ready.
Primum mobile again: no onanist
nor organ grinder's monkey, the Moirae
hold the image of her child apart and
stiff, pinched up on a potter's wheel.
But the Inquisition, not Lachesis
holds the shears to snip or
deliver this fertile birth.
And the river of the Duchess of Alba,
maja desnuda, deltas into a White
Nile isthmus of its after-image,
seen in the picture of the men at war,
the mind's Colossus, gulfed and fed
wherever there's quicksand enough
to hold us to our brutal pounding.
This is the garden where it starts,
a cornflower abode of aloe
and apple-of-Sodom, the only spot
of sun in this primeval woods,
here preserved and cherished, an Archimedes wheel
of sonnet-etched glass which spirals down
to what's below and rising, throttling
our zorrilla paradise, snow parrots,
goshawk chicks and a hundred kinds
of wheat fleas. The whole parade--
a romería--beneath the teeming surface
of the lake is rich rich blood of the artist's arms.
Pinpoint gash of Rubens red on her heel
is the soul of the hag, or hagged-out mark
of Cain as the painter's signature--
the ruby taint by which we feel
what's female, and alive, and possible.