Brief History
Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while.
—Groucho Marx
I still hear the Mediterranean thrumming
in my blood, as good an explanation as any
for me turning up here, no brighter
than the next collection of electrons
& quantum scraps . . . a light-beam
legacy—little more than a wish lifting
away on some cosmic dust.
Nothing left
to be said for the Assyrians descending
on the plains, or Aleric & the Visigoths
rumbling Rome, 410 AD—let alone for
Little Anthony & The Imperials ruling
the doo-wop record empire of the ‘60s
until 1984 when Veinberg and I walk into
the Dixie Melody—a Paris basement jazz bar—
like princes from a battered republic
where long-shot arts lotteries 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 beer
in return for a few lines from Wordsworth’s
sonnet, 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 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.
A month before,
in San Sadurni d’Anoia—in the hills in back
of Barcelona—we were popping bottles of cava
with workers after their Sunday ½-day shifts,
celebrating grand-nephews of the anarchists
and the anniversary of the death of Franco,
before wobbling up the one street to catch
a tranvia back, carrying ½ a case each
on our shoulders before passing out and
coming-to in Sitges, 3 stations past our stop.
The International Herald Tribune overlooked
my dispatches documenting the beach
at Castelldefels, sparkling and empty of invaders
all winter, as well as my communiqués from
Bar España, free of fascists and 5th columnists,
schooners of Tio Pepe on the table rewarding us
for having trudged through miles of essays and
late shifts to reach the island, against all odds
and the dissipation of my 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 Carlos Primero
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 the academic barrel at a 4th rate institution
it took 10 years to escape from, 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
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 it’s more so
than our lives, oblique beneath the unannotated
stars, though a stellar drift’s been chronicled
toward a place where light and matter
likely blow away to nothing . . . which is where
they began about 14 billion years ago—
an index and footnotes 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 some 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 of the dust
and incidentals.</span
