Dear L.,

            In this long summer afternoon—twilight

of the sick, late-flowering beast, I sit here, sad

Simmacus, far from Carthage.  All night thunder

walks the mountains.  Behind rose-stucco walls

of decaying Moorish villas, drenched darkness

of untended gardens where nightingales once sang

I hear through slow accumulations of time

cool blue hallucinations, ancient fountains.  Dawn

brings to glittering neon reefs, coral hotels,

glass discos, flamenco bars, salt-cellar towers

of The Harbor of the Dove, welled in stars,

the fat lady on her Solex, baskets

of surprising fire.  Swaggering the seawall,

the Guardia Civil hides its crippled fist.

The lifetime democrat who once blessed the worms

that feasted on the corpses of “those sons of whores,

Allende & Neruda,” cringes as he slips by.

He’d kill me if he could.  After siesta,

I watch the fishermen paint white boats white

as shark teeth.  Children still ask for “the stranger

of hat & smoke who walks in winter shoes.”  You

appear to me in dreams weeping for the week’s

bad weather, making gestures I do not understand.

Are you well?  Amigo, I’ve sailed with the angel of fog,

stared into the asshole of death, yet sometimes I forget

this too shall pass—a nation of bellhops and gigolos

trading iron chains for gold.  Already in Calle d’Or

they’ve eaten the poison apple, here it hasn’t fallen

from the bough.  What is freedom, then?

Even a galley slave catches on the blade of his oar

a glimpse of the morning star.  Yes, in this village

of gossips & spies I’ve come to admire

the longevity of cockroach & shark—an old elephant

heavy with memories dragging his bones along.

I spend my days interpreting the silences of those

time has not passed through—widows of the sea

wrapped in their dark weeds waiting for what the rising tide

no longer brings, children bearing dead men’s eyes

to an exiled king.  I feel all kinds of ends

implacably closing in from hidden places where

dust & dryness come.  Lonelier than a lighthouse,

wander cracks in time—the last man on earth

sniffing footprints, twigs, branches for the lingering

smell of the first.  More & more hear rumors of postmen

melting under the sun, never reaching destinations,

tiny forgetful ones.  Ours is the exile,

not the kingdom.

                                    As ever,

                                                  M.