Month: August 2019

Phone Notes from Spain

/ Salvatore Ala / Leave a comment

Madrid

Strange thing about Madrid, even though I have only been here a short time it feels like a long time. It feels like I have been here my whole life or like I had come back at last to some other incarnation that has recognized its own shadow on the street.

The Desperate Bookshop

Was under repair. An American from Seattle who now lives in Paris was building new shelves for the bookshop in Madrid. He allowed me to browse the few desperate shelves that were still standing. One shelf was poetry. I read through a few collections, which seemed to me like the most desperate thing to do.

El Rey

Seems surreal to be sitting outside a Madrid theater at five am, seeing the garish, glowing advertisement for the Disney musical “El Rey Leon.” A homeless man approaches me with open hand. I reach in my pocket. The sun hasn’t come up but there is an orange light from the theatre marquee shining on us both. He smiles like the King of Night.

The Bolano Cafe

I saw a guy in a Madrid coffee shop who looked exactly like Roberto Bolano. Bolano lived in Spain. I spoke to the body double and told him he looked like the great Chilean writer and he said: “who?” From then on I referred to the coffee shop as The Bolano Cafe. Who knows what is possible in the metaphysical realm of fiction?

Gran Villa

Everyone on Gran Villa seemed to be tumbling down the street like acrobats from another dimension. In the evening light between blue and rose, I thought of Picasso’s “Family of Saltimbanques.” I joined the circus of the human family.

Salome

Her name was Salome. Salome. Our eyes met and for several seconds her Flamenco was suspended in that wild gaze when guitar strings come undone and even old men lose their heads.

 

The Gift of Literature

/ Salvatore Ala / 2 Comments

My son says that being home is like a replica of being home. I say Kerouac captures something of that. My son says interminable minutes of nothingness offend him most. I say the best I’ve read about interminable minutes of nothingness is in the arid landscapes of Roberto Bolano. My son says that the baseline of existence is chaos. I say that for Empedocles love was the opposite of chaos. My son says that he feels trapped by language. I say you’re sharing an office with Wittgenstein now. My son says life seems emergent. I say Henri Bergson did some creative thinking. My son says nice talking to you dad. I say nice talking to you son. Between us I think, interminable highways of nothingness, replicas of towns, chaos and something quite emergent between fathers and sons.

The Waterwheel

/ Salvatore Ala / Leave a comment

Salvatore Ala's avatarSalvatore Ala

For long spells the flour mill closed
And the waterwheel would be overrun
By morning glories,
Even anchored by the vines,
Like a wreath for the funeral of the sun.

Other times I thought the wheel
Turned imperceptibly
Like a seasonal clock
Endazzled by its own reflection
In the sunken mirrors of the earth.

For all we know another wheel
Turns the wheel;
Another sun inside the sun
Outlasts the waterwheel
And the bread of dumb flesh,
Producing the flour of morning glories
Spread beyond its grindstone,
Beautiful as a second coming
That never arrives.

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Poetry and Sleep

/ Salvatore Ala / Leave a comment

In a dream her husband appears
Younger than the day they met.
In a dream he touches his wife
With wordless love in his heart.
In dreams, their child is laughing,
And they’re laughing at their child
And a green park has no horizon.
We believe dreams in doubt of doubt
And don’t live with our losses
But live remainders of dreams
Like we live with moonlight
And traces of distant wind
And sunrise on ashen skin,
Rivers moving deep within.
In a dream his mother sat mutely
Mending the boundaries of his life.
In a dream her brother was a child
And she was mother to her brother.
In a dream, dear friends together,
At first in a familiar backyard;
Later, in an unknown city,
Itself dreaming a collective,
Building inescapable routes.
In dreams, each other, mingled
Of the magic materials of night,
Who vanish utterly into sleeping day
And unremembered poems,
Whomever, whatever we do.

Black Moon

/ Salvatore Ala / 2 Comments

The black moon sifts
The sand for the glass of its eye
And passes over water
Washing night from its wake
Dripping its ink over trees
Invisible month of moons
Filling my glass with black wine
And dark stars without portent
Giving us the word lunation
To accept all that’s in creation
Darkening the mountains
Changing all flowers black
Making everyone look
Descendants of descendants
Desirous of the same peace
Distant at proximity
Closer than shadows