José
The train passes the tranquil forest of Sils before Girona.
Afternoons are lethargic. A pestilence of flies, the sound of rifles.
‘There’s nothing here in this town’, a German backpacker warns.
Unsure of the way, I sniff the piss along the quiet boulevarde.
They say the river has dried up, sprouting islands of weedy grass.
The pensione’s owner is French but speaks un pequeno ingles.
There are mornings when I’ve woken to the rawness of the day,
to a city failing memory, as unforgiving as a lover, its fringes
blurring into chalky, yellow haze, its walls and citadels crumbling.
I want to remember the red earth, the white-washed village,
José playing guitar, the courtyard swirling as pigeon wings
shatter the Lorcan sky; his intricate flame, his soléares.
Departures
Some days we trust more than desire, trying to be true
to morning’s distractions. By the afternoon, what have
we achieved? My friend was abandoned by her spouse.
After the separation I spoke to her, outside the school,
the maple dropping its serrated leaves, pink camellias
shedding curls. I watched her stroke her daughter's face
with a strange tenderness. As we walked our children
to parked cars, somewhere near the pedestrian crossing,
where four wheel drives decelerate for a speed hump,
it occurred to me that just as we’re balanced in flight,
an updraught spins us through its turbulent revolutions.
We could almost trust what disappears. In falling, how
buoyant is the human heart. Lifting our wings we learn
to fly by descent. Equal to the earth’s pull, we brake.
Circa 1916
Photograph by Paul Strand
Who is this woman striding the sidewalk?
Swiftly departing the picture, a dowdy renegade
summoned from her errands by the clarinet player
on West 11th. So misaligned in the frame, as if
her gender’s chained. Her hoops and haberdashery
are miniaturised by facades, their cubist shadows.
From the mirrored city, lips pressed, she elopes.
And her footprints scrape the day’s inheritance.
Her incident abridged by the photographer’s lens.
Michelle Cahill's poems have appeared in World Literature Today, Drunken Boat, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Australian Literary Review and others. She was highly commended in the Blake Poetry Prize & won the Val Vallis Award & the Inverawe Poetry Prize (minor.) The author of two collections of poetry, she is a fellow at Hawthornden Castle in 2011. She edits Mascara Literary Review. |
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