27 Years & Pájaros de Barro

 OR We Are Now in The 27 Club

Pájaros de Barro

Hoy son pájaros de barro que quieren volar –Manolo García

Our hands met in the thick clay

of providence’s two-tongued river.

We made a dam in our haste –

birds of clay from sanctified waters.

Our hands entwined and we carried

those clay birds to the sea; the beach

blew its white sand over us all –

a blessing, a bonding, a benediction.

Our hands wrenched apart – drought

in our two-tongued river drained

the sea, left you dry, me full of salt

water our clay birds could not drink.

Our hands turned into my hands which

have held our clay birds up to each

rising tide. I hold them again, feel

your touch as they empty my hands.

Sant Jordi #24

    After the Hail 

          for Pep, 24 years later 

The apple tree died while I 

was gone, its bark stripped 

and fallen back to the pot, 

the largest one on the terrace.

Stark, nobby branches choked 

by equally dead morning glory 

tendrils hold sacs of seeds 

stiffly in the April wind. 

Both dead things remain 

to train the thick nasturtium 

stalks with their wealth 

of perpetual sunset. 

Opposite, the barely salvaged 

pine tree pushes its newborn 

needles towards the sun. They

follow east to south to west. 

Among all the dead branches 

in sunburned pots bursting 

with wild garlic, clover, asparagus, 

the surprise of this tall purple iris. 

 🐍🌹📚

24 April 2020 (22 years later)

April 24, 2020

                      For Pep, 22 years later

You tried to steal all of my holidays:

your birthday, just days before mine;

Bloomsday forever the anniversary

of your death. Somehow, until today,

Sant Jordi had escaped. Never a holiday – 

none of mine ever were – World Book Day

is now a thing, but then Sant Jordi was mine

by adoption – count the books in my house

dated April 23^rd – and yours by birth: 

Barcelona being the only thing we had

in common when we succumbed to the thrill

of the first kiss, to the knowledge that we had

arrived at our shared doorstep, our first day

of blind choices, so glaringly obvious

in hindsight.

Those six books, because you made it

to a sixth, line the shelf by our bed, the bed

I haven’t slept in since February, since

travelling home to see our daughter fence

and being trapped by this pandemic. Trapped

at home, not home. In a house I never grew up in,

with a father I barely recognize, far from all

those books, from all those Sant Jordis

on my own, with my girls, with you, without you,

on my own.

Here at my home not home I have nothing to hand

which your hand touched, no inscription, no dates,

no declarations of love. This is my seventeenth

Sant Jordi without you, though you never took it

away. It has taken a pandemic. So now, instead

of Sant Jordi, instead of streets full of books and

young people hawking roses, instead of exhaustion

from kilometers shuffled among human currents

flowing past author signings, spending too much

money, weighted by books I will never finish, I am

quarantined, confined. the first Sant Jordi I have

missed. The first Sant Jordi I have spent

just missing you.

kc 23 April 2020
143

Prole 19 Silent Dance

Prole has published my poem, Silent Dance in issue #19. Prole pays royalties, so I'm posting the link here to purchase it, rather than posting the poem.
Prole, Poetry and Prose, Issue 19.
I read it yesterday, Sant Jordi, in the Plaza del Pi, where I was invited to read by the Pintors del Pi. I wrote a translation and read that as well, and that is what I'm posting here.
Silent Dance is yet another poem dedicated to the memory of Pep. Today marks 18 years since that first kiss. I can still hear him singing Aute to me. 143

Esta silenciosa danza

Maldito baile de muertos. Hace
que la lucha por enamorarse
se asemeje a una noche de botellón;

que la tinta desaparezca del papel
para surgir después entre sinapsis
o en medio de alguna tarde;

que un soplo de aire desde un portal
(humo de tabaco negro, insinuación
de cloro) sepa a aquella isla;

que la iluminación de la luna sobre
este sillón tapizado recoja notas de
Aute. Al Alba en falsete tremuloso.