for Bob Pinto
The day my professor died
I found this stone.
It stood out from the others.
The stone that others reject
Becomes my cornerstone,
The first matter of all things.
It’s a good stone, full of questions,
A complete mystery,
And sometimes its own answer.
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.
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.
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.
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
Perhaps I should learn a new language
And speak to my wife
In elementary phrases
Like her simple piano chords.
Then after so many years
Of marriage and silence,
Her loneliness and mine
Waltz into the same room
As though we’ve never met
And share the first new
Meaningful words of love
In a hybrid language
Still learning what it means.
Carries the meadow into the woods,
The young river into the old,
The forest line into timberland,
Solid darkness stained
That gives a shape to fear,
Except for divergent paths
Dappled with fallen leaves
Like a fox snake splitting in two
And the sun bleeding through.
Fern-seed sparkles in the dust.
The wheel is wrapped with hemp.
Green is the transilluminator of black.
Three drops of sun blood in my eye.
Night at my threshold.
Devil’s wood at my door.
I caught an angel with sintered wings
And fiery breath, burning the rope,
Sinking into the frozen depth
With my magnet in his mouth.
I magnetized a steelhead salmon,
A gun with fins, rosary of fishhooks,
Cast iron turtle, coins in shells
And knife with gills. I drew up a star.
The poles, in an air gap, touched.
The sun lifted from the load line
And a rare earth moment began,
The magic alive in all domains,
With a flux day moon in a web.
Then I pulled up a strongbox
With God’s inductions on love;
A toolbox with God’s tools,
Despite the irreversible losses
For the final restitution of love.
It was then I felt the snap
Of eddy currents saturate my shadow
And I knew I’d never give up.
I pulled up my own return path
Magnetized into a larger, deeper field.
Fill the air with music and talk,
A little wine and later, Bach.
Lulls punctuated by counterpoint
Are their own musical midpoint.
It is like love at prima vista,
Music my first and ever lingua.
I listen to their close voicing
Without myself at all digressing
Into the old man, the angry man,
The bitter and forgotten sideman.
Listening cries angels in my ears
And piano runs melt my fears
And the trumpet my daughter plays
Distills the light with moon rays
And the changes they are blowing
Are the real future we are sowing.
Salvatore Ala 