A Brief History
. . . a street where blind men sold nightingales. —Alan Furst
When I close my eyes I can still hear
echoes of the Mediterranean in my blood,
thrumming in my ears . . . as good a reason
as any for me to have turned up here,
no brighter than the next aggregate of electrons
& quantum scraps . . . a light-beam legacy—
little more than a wish lifting away
on some cosmic dust. . . .
Not much now
left to be said for the Assyrians descending
on the plains, or Aleric & the Visagoths
rumbling Rome, 410 AD—let alone for
Little Anthony & The Imperials ruling
the early doo-wop empire in the ‘60s
until 1984 when I walk into the Dixie Melody—
a Paris basement jazz bar—with my pal
Veinberg, (2nd cousin to a Viking) as if
we were princes of a battered republic
where a long-shot arts lottery set us loose
with wads of Francs in our jeans so that
for once we didn’t have to soft-soap
some sad sack at the bar to buy us a round
in return for a haiku, as we carried no union cards
to verify our bona fides. We felt certain
that it was Carmen McRae on stage there
with that behind-the-beat, ironic working
of the lyrics to a wholly appropriate
Nice Work if you Can Get It,
after just half a dozen Heinekens
into the early hours. . . . No mention
was made of this or the never-to-be-seen-again
amazing exchange rate in the morning edition
of Le Figaro, nor was it commented on
over Café Américain at the Sorbonne
nearly so often as Beaumarchais. . . .
A month before, in San Sadurni d’Anoia—,
in the hills in back of Barcelona—we’d
popped bottles of cava with workers
after their Sunday ½-day shifts
to celebrate the last nephews of
the anarchists and the anniversary
of the death of Franco, then wobbled
up the one street to the tranvia back to
Castelldefels, ½ a case each on our shoulders
before passing out and coming-to in Sitges,
3 stations past our stop. . . .
Journalists
overlooked our excursions, my dispatches
documenting the beach at Cala Galdana,
Menorca, sparkling and empty of invaders
all winter, as well as my communiqués about
Bar España free of fascists and 5th columnists,
schooners of Tio Pepe on the table
for next to nothing, for time already served
trudging through quagmires of essays and
late shifts to reach the island, against the odds
and the dissipation of my checking account.
I crawled in unnoticed with the sea mist,
and despite my school-boy Spanish,
managed to wander incognito for most
of a year through the capital, Es Castell,
without a single Guardia Civil pegging me
for a renegade.
This evening I’m
keeping company with Fernet-Branca
as fog rolls into the yard grey as
a water-stained bar glass in Tapas Lupe
next to the bus station in Mahon,
as troubles scraped up from the bottom
of an academic barrel at a 4th rate institution
where it took 10 years to find a way out,
a fugitive looking to the sky for any handhold
on a cloud, any hope before I could no longer
interpret the shorthand, the sky-spatter,
as I did all those afternoons after school. . . .
And now the spice finches are absent
from my wild plum trees—no hint
where they’ve gone, and, more to the point,
where we’re all going into the unmarked
margins of the sky. . . .
The dark
that was spread about the universe
is not endless, but is more so than
our lives, oblique beneath the unannotated
stars, though they’ve chronicled
a stellar drift toward a place where
light and matter likely blow away
to nothing . . . which is where they began
close to 14 billion years ago—an index
and footnotes, so far, regrettably
unavailable. . . . Dusk, and one wave
washes away as existentially as the next,
one or the other which will roll up
around my shoes as I sit here one day,
and so solve everything . . . the years
brooding by the shore, the scumbled,
salt-white clouds that continue to skim
the sands ignoring most all the dust
and incidentals.
