Fifteen years old, I lean into the wind of the house of the deaf,
bracing against the jag of amethyst I hold.
First words I ever wrote on news scrap,
I had to do it blind, feeling the gossamer-pull
of birch bark on my warm, peached cheek,
up against encounters with this certain face.
La Leocadia -- eternity of nos in the supple posturing
of maja, mother, minister of grace or whore.
Who taught me to do this? To look into the heart
of a woman and see the vituperate blood of a god?
For a boy's ears, the tremolo's too bold, insistent,
a Missa Solemnis wafted across the meadow
of San Isidro -- my backyard -- where I discover
the matted hair of a girl after the rape is publicized.
So these Spanish tortures still titillate: lover
and mother and child to the painter slouches
on a hill of graveworms, the sleek ankle
pulled in to caress the soldier in the mind of Goya.
But none of this I would have imagined then;
I rooting toadstools and out-pronouncing
the poisonous ones. Her eyes glance over me,
to the gathering stratus-work above.
Here's tomb for Semele, smouldering out
charred plum-skin, slunk into the mouths
of those who live but no longer care.
Insurrection is surmountable -- the fires burn along
the Manzanares River. The terraced hill
is mountainside for the earth-burnt fury
of a court of angels coaxing out early sunset:
melancholia asleep. A dog curls at the girl's feet,
just beyond the frame, fence, fever of night coming on.
Screech owls glide to the stars above the hillside
crucifix, a natural landscape for Inquisitional Madrid.
Her eyes conceal what comes of the hurdy-gurdy's
sexy midnight drone, shivered out of the sepulchre
of rock: a sign of the magus that only the maja knows.