12 Towards A Definition of the Seasons by Duncan MCGibbon (classic reads txt) 📖

clans
in pleated skirts
and black trousers.
while the new girls
on “La Movida”
tinkle in denims
and donkey -jackets.
knock-kneed and elegant
outside the bars,
while the boys play
with their bikes and guitars.
The Socialist Monarchy
is in another retreat
as the hoardings shout.

8. Hotel

The English at breakfast,
prim, matronly hair
bobs in the uncertainty
of girls’ school accents
and what is Renaissance,
while bearded men, billow
pullovers and waistcoats.
The world blabs or blubbers
out of fading Evelyn Waugh
paperbacks, the conversation
a thin plasma of Players smoke
dares to ask for kippers
and reports the bomb-scare
in North London
to resume the sought-after
excuse of continental rest.

Acceptable topics,
the weather, where to eat,
whether the Spanish work,
the coach driver,
the nice young guide,
where the Spanish work.

Unacceptable topics,
Catholicism,
the Leeds’ couples
boring daughter
“They only brought her
along to help her out”
and the election.

9. Alcazar

In the Alcazar,
grotesqueries
of Bourbons,
pigeon-chested,
Poe-browed.
The drunken trees
lean against Arabic brick,
studded with thorns.

Inez is putting out
jamon, berengeras
con queso and I too,
praise love’s counterweight

in ham and aubergines
with cheese, should
fit Inez not stay here,
Baltasar del Alcazar

Not city, but a world,
a ship on the Atlantic,
crewed by Leonore , Susanna,
Carmen and Leonora.

escaping all the
blind seducers
the penis-hearted
stagey lovers.

Herrera’s Spain
is a rotten corpse
its fame is dwarfed
by real demons

the poets meet
to be led away
by the pulse
of soft hands.

10.Ecija

The towers blaze under a springtime sun
Sanchez de Badajoz in his madness
cannot feel the glare,
imagines Troy, Constantinople ,

Jerusalem, Baby lon,
do not burn as brightly
as his tear-stained heart.
Children are rehearsing

in a theatre that casts
its sound over me,
a real shadow on
my burning fear.


11.Cordova
The old city comes into view
across the river, ink
from Cedron, Tiber and the Euphrates,
poured on parchment.
We are turned alive
into the pages of vanished time.

Leila, Ruth, Beatrice
each hands the book to the other,
until it crosses the river,
a chrism, poured out on their mingled tresses.
Islands and weirs under a spring sun,
corded together with thick gravid waters,
It has gathered the antonymic Roman arch
and the Gongora monument,

Dumash, friend of Sa’adia Gaon
and Hasdai ibn Shaprut,
who speak only the pure language of God,
coax the words which
are literal about our love
into the shafts of sunlight.
Yet the Karaites,
forcing the day to walk
between silence and shadow,
covered with leather and
snapping shutters,
push us apart and bid us not to sleep,
for it is time to enjoy good wine,
while the taste of myrrh, aloes,
pomegranates, dates and grapes
lingers with the fragrance,
of lilies and henna.

Come into this garden now.
Our hearts are finished with pain
The catches the gentle meniscus
with its restless fire.
All is at peace now,
here in the last
unprinted chapter of the guidebook.
Here in the unseeable
jewel-house in the primal monument
You and I will cross floors of marble
that glisten like slate in unending rain.
We will walk down corridors
which look out on
doves resting in palm trees
It will be peaceful
under this brilliant sun
and my hand speaks its homage
to the nakedness of your heart.
We will close mahogany doors
on the galleries of our lost friends.

12.The Roman arch

Cordova brought me,
Nero took me
Lucan’s father in law
still sings the plain song
that wrestles the snakes
of death and feasting.
The mosque

Two enigmas
the darkness cannot solve
and morning light
unpuzzles, you and me.

The blood we
shed when
shielding a wound
is best unspent.

Death has its
open wound
more routinely
incurable.

13. The Cathedral

Towers and high walls
of history and rule,
of cunning and rudeness,
the great river flows on.

It is a master of fine sands,
even though it gives
no gift of gold.
The hill rises steeply,

the plains green with crops
It is heaven and sunlight shines
on the landscape
of Gongora’s, which
summons up past power
and the written word

Did he forget the ruins
the rivers Genil and Dauro
irrigate and cool
did he ever see these walls,

these towers and
these rivers again
Your hills and plain.
Your land, your Spain
and yet whose flower?

14.The Synagogue

The place is your wearied girl
with its shattered walls
mere mosaic, a broken rose

I think of
a saddened heart
and walk out
with these walls
my body now.


15.Passing a Carnival, Carmona.

The girls poised
before the church,
their bronze limbs
already a wonder of love.

Their languorous backs
and wired wings
open up their sex
like ripe chrysalises.

They look at you
without shame,
or love, as gentle
as a guitar that

scatters a tremolo,
a toque in their smooth
breasts and soothes
with unknown peace.

They are infants
of love’s hunger
who cry, uncertain,
unseen, in the arms

of a chance future.
They are the
theory of life
and you, male dunce

for once
its smiling,
tolerated
proof.


16.Return

The taxi on the A4 Highway
is a spectre of the night,
looking for its grave
with only its skull to lose.

You kiss your teeth
at the cheap hotel’s
unnecessary bill.
I turn from holiday

omnivorousness
back to the bloodthirst
of work and the darkness.
The light is equal between us.

It makes you beautiful.
While I grow heavy
with the sadness of poets
you have no time for.

Night has changed
places with day
in the almanac
that is the history

of our love. Time’s kiss
is the only one left
I’m sure of
and so it goes on
Imprint

Publication Date: 11-14-2010

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