Where are the snow-white oxen come from nowhere,
hitched to San Isidro in the middle of a frought in June?
And those ploughing angels who showed de Vargas
this was no ordinary laborer? Here the haunted
rhythms of the dusk can bathe in ochre every
solemn impulse to believe in afterlife.
Race car drivers look out at him across
their windshield rabbits' feet, all over Spain,
even as bare-assed acolytes scoff at a mummied corpse
and kiss its cartilaged, reliquary feet. Here's the lost,
arched bridge over the river to the Sordo,
where Isidro's only son has crapped in a mossed-veined
well and doesn't die, fiftieth miracle of the year 1130.
But now, in linseed grass-stained ebonies
and lead-white moonlit skies we catapult
ladylike El Greco out of the globe-glass orb
of earth which is earth's mirror, when we sing
the saint's lolling cancíon of dawn, Cantabrian
bones of his wife stacked in parsonage, outside
the only river's crossing till one rococo church
walks home. The deaf-mute me is squelching berries
and radishes; sodden in lampblack we climb
to the top of Bruegel's hill, high enough to plunder
a kestrel's hair-weave of twigs and ibis eggs,
to stretch our warlock neckpieces and ready
for the ancient, ordinary kill of Job. Quixote nuevo,
Espíritu Santo, embers of flamenco fueling
the firestorm burning up the backbone
of the Guardarramas, second moonrise
two borrachos skimming black whey
from the Age of Reason, straddled by
carnnelian nuns who scream pleats off their tatters,
into the fold of skin where mary lies, dolt'like,
waiting for a second draught of oranged rye.
Picasso's henchmen slink past the sword of light,
some Tereze in Ecstasy, Ixion's wheel of ice,
freeing what music this chambered nautilus
of sheepfold bleats. The chanting sucks
at the sphere of the death of God,
beneath the foetid surface of this lake-pool picture,
one hidden egress to an aging underworld.
As a boy I'm one of those that fails to see the miracle,
bloody toe-stump and gaping craven mouth,
succumbing to wheeze and dropsy of the air.
My dead father has to carry me up
to where thion harlequins take leaks and slake
the privileges of fucking. The half-crazed,
lice-wigged, drowsy El Coco Que Habla,
with his two-stringed mandolin strums
the mudcake seasick urchins back to the skirts
of raven Judith, who still starves for love and justice,
blathering at dopeheads just a step ahead of me
in this dance for the patron saint of Mesmer and Madrid.