My grandfather had a good heart
and some men, competent.
He had a pair of bodyguards
and a smoking jacket, two cadillacs,
a game room-monte or bacarat-in a casino
on the weary eastern slope of the Andean range,
at the very feet of the snows. Also
a variety theater where the striptease girls
showed their garters, showed their corsets.
And my grandfather withstood it
and with his reckless "personnel," he was protected.

My grandfather's age would be around
one hundred and twenty, a considerable bit
of history wide with flavor and pain.
More than a century of life,
if he had lived surrounded by his skilled men,
by his Lola Mora, the Bella Otero
of this side of the Pyrenees, covered
by the blank cold of drugs, of the resigned
ermines, of cash redeemers, of parishioners; pilots
of zeppelins and wheels and vapors and unforeseen things
and ladinos with their strange conversation
and rough disdain for open guarantees
like wings of butterflies set into fedoras.

As such, surrounded by the sickly cabaret singers,
though they were fortunate, he lived
and died like the smoke unfurled
in his casino, above a carpet of cards, through
a series of strikes that were skilled and suspicious,
or just serious. He lived
and died like the smoke undone
and the snow; like the unfolding dancers,
my good grandfather: hallowed
be his name, his kingdom come, monarch
of the low skies, of the bright clouds edging in.

2.

Pepe Menese sings and the oysters
fly through his mouth. The taste
of the sea comes all the way to Chiclana de la Frontera and
twists itself in the sacred ankles of Antonio Farina.

The flamenco's footwork booms, the world
cracks like a prison break. Memory
trembles, the flames
of suffering agitate.

The world shrieks from pain
in its cell, in the backs
of disposed throats.
Its smell is the flavor
of sea, the rising of a voice during war.

What was your inner skin like, that terse
world, your life of mine that was cast
in mirrors, that kept watch over
its muzzle loaders.

The dark scream must be heard
and the sun, unborn like your friends; the signs
of the ancient flame
must be seen.

I am about to open the doors, to close
my eyes and not look
past the tip of my nose, not smell,
not touch the name of God in vain.