Up close the cordilleras look like backdrop
drama props for the Neoclassical stage.
The stench of eucalyptus leaves, falling,
a quaff to save all this. Just one aliquot
of Augustine is left, nearly winter of
what looks like the last of the city
of unGod on a hill, as it just stands still.
Some sort of transubstantiation of the itchy flesh
in the mein of all these new unbaptised-
by fire, John, or the blindworm newt
of the long long caves below El Moro,
which spring from the Cave of Cavadongo,
where Don Pelayo splayed the waters forth
for us before. Cavern of mysteries, Eleusis:
here we find what so interests Inquisitors
that they travel with their pregnant vicars
to snuffle a clot of rouge upon one hanky,
because of some legend of a bleeding nun,
out of which Isidro's son and mother,
Maria de la Cabeza, gush forth unto world.
Here archangels resin their bows, unstoppling
flutes to chorus and bury this foundering
in the dark of being or not knowing,
not in the granite chantries of Asturias,
not in the crow's fly in from Oviedo, but just
below this verge of cliff, utopian ideal
of a century yet to come, we picture-freeze
a moment and try to use divining rods,
glance back at the opiate of what
the church once was. Spanish peacocks
prate beyond a halo of the precipice,
where prescience lives. More of
the suffocating thrall of the blind
as they ogle at the blind. Where pagan
joy is islanded, where one saint kisses
another to feel how cold his prick is.
Encore. Another cleansed one to inter:
bagpipe, musette, forget the use of organ.
From the throat of the cave you can't see
a single itinerant member of the cross
of killing -- it's as if you'd already
made a way to the city on the hill, where
the only language sung at all is rhyme.