Listening to Lorca

1. Color of Home

I met you by Battery Park where the bridge once was.
Invisible it ran between the towers.
What made you follow mw, O ghost in black cutaways?

Dear Mr. Lorca I address you,
filled with a formal feeling.
You were tongue tied on the subway till a voice cried out:

Thirty-fourth Street, last stop on the D.
It’s the Empire State, our tallest again,
time to gather personal belongings, figure out redemption.

You leaned into my ribs muttering:
did you hear that, you seller of salt
and gatherer of ash just as your foremothers were?

How the world goes on and on.
Have you ever seen a bullfight?
What do you have strapped to your back?

Then quieter, under your breath:
Let’s survive the last stop together.
I knew a Hindu ballerina once,

Nothing like you, a quick, delicate thing.
I walked with her by the river
those months when English fled from me

And the young men of Manhattan
broke cherry twigs and scribbled on my skin
till one cried out – I am the boy killed by dark water,

surely you know me?
Then bolt upright you whispered:
Why stay on this island?

See how it’s ringed by water and flame?
You who have never seen Granada –
Tell me, what is the color of home?


2. Casida of a Flowering Tree


Go to Monticello, tell me who’s buried
under the flowering cherry tree.
Is it Jefferson’s daughter with honey-colored hair?
Or Jefferson’s son who served his father
burst figs on a blue-veined plate,
then crept into the old man’s room
to stroke a coverlet seamed with silk?
Glass ornaments from Paris hurt his fist.
The house threaded with weights started to float.
The young man wept till his tears
flowered in Córdoba.
I have written about him in the song
you read as a child. The one with the line
at five in the afternoon. Don’t you recall?


3. Central Park, Carousel


June already. It’s your birth month,
nine months since the towers fell.
I set olive twigs in my hair
torn from a tree in Central Park.
I ride a painted horse, it’s mane a sullen wonder,
You are behind me on a lilting mare.
You whisper – What of happiness?
Dukham, Federico. Smoke fills my eyes.
Young, I was raised to a sorrow song
short fires and stubble on a monsoon coast.
The leaves in your ca[ are very green.
The eyes of your mare never close.
Somewhere you wrote: Despedida,
if I die leave the balcony open!