for Mark Strand
La Barraca Blues Suite/i.

Beneath canopies of green, unionists marched doggedly
outside The Embassy. Their din was no match
for light lancing through leaves of madrone trees
lining the Paseo then flashing off glossy black Maybachs
skidding round a plaza like a monarch fleeing the paparazzi.
Your voice skipped and paused like a pencil.
Layers of morning pastries flaked gingerly
then fell, soft as vowels, on a china plate. One learns
to cherish the wizened reserve of old world manners,
two blotched hands making wings of a daily paper
beside us between sips of café con leche, a demeanor
in short gentle as grand edifaces along this boulevard.
Yet Guernica is down the street, and some windshields
wear a sinister face, sometimes two. Think Goya. Just south
of here, on the lower slopes of the Sierras, fields
of olive groves braid the land like a Moorish head, but
those sultans were kicked out long ago. In the lobby
of the Hotel Urban, I wait for a cab, my obedient rolling bag
like a pet beside me. I have loved again another city
but Madrid is yours: her caped olés, her bullish flag,
her glass pavilions and outdoor tables like a festival
of unbroken laughter, our dark harbors, finding level.

ii.
Salobreña

That stretch of mountains features white windmill
blades whose slow turns are rifles aiming, for I cannot
help but think of Lorca's killing between here and the
village
Alfaçar, and the firing squad's gun pops are that Flamencan
dancer's heel stomps. I bring back, too, her brisk hand claps
and the cantor's Andalusian moans like dried sticks,
or bones crumbling in his throat. Only souvenir shops
and steep winding streets accrete in this region's stacked
brochures. Her dress spills across the restaurant's floor
like a red shadow, darker than billboards of black bulls
high above roadways, motionless but seeming to gallop
like Franco's brigades. All seeing is an act of war.
Tanks and artillery or Spanish castles and mosques?
I choose to lose, and beneath a watercolorist's sky
study Didi's splendor, nude against the unruffled backdrop
of the Alboran Sea whose waves match my sighs
and bomb this beach, launching sprays of white duds.

iii.
Córdoba, Mezquita

Even if he'd pulled over to study Andalusia's road signs,
after one thousand and one nights, he still could
not make out its calligraphic script, its vertical lines,
its dots, marks like smoke stilled from incense, its curled
sand soft Arabic, but this city's voice has coffins
and carnations, and its hoarse singing shoots through him
like twelve bars of earthen road that lengthens
into a labyrinth of knowing blood beneath black skin.
More echoes: the Alhambra sent him back to the seraglio
of his youth where a Moorish guard stood in a museum,
unfazed by a harem's rising laughter behind palace doors.
Here are pillars and banded arches to once again
imagine the body passing through like a key into infinity.
Was this the answer to his ghetto past? But why travel
so far? Since a child, even in sleep, he voyaged and broke free,
tossing dice in dreams, once below deck on a caravel
next to grains of paradise. He's collecting a thousand faces.
He's moving beneath eyelids, turning time into flesh.
Don't judge him. The courtyard's orange trees where once
he washed like a morisco are teaching his tongue the craft.