A book I’ve just finished “On Earth and in Poems: the Many Lives of Al-Andalus”, by Eric Calderwood, motivated me to reread a little collection of poems I put together and Susan fashioned into a chapbook back in 2005. I plan to present these poems in Compendium: The Kitchen Sink in chunks, much the way I have published other collections of mine, like “Pearl’s Own Book of Birds” and “49 Love Poems”. Here are the first three poems from that collection.
Hotel Goya
Tabarca
I Met No One
(the ghost of a forgotten Visigoth warrior poet sings)
*
Hotel Goya Why have walls at all? This grid of rooms on a narrow street in a nest of narrow streets is an Escher print of barely muffled conversations no one is supposed to hear, groans and bed springs, the ring of a phone two doors down. The walls must be wide open somewhere, a scrim hung over the whole side of the hotel. Some god or some Gulliver’s giant watches play after play up and down the tiny elevator, the narrow steps and the skinny halls in and out of this web of rooms. Outside this multi-staged theatre of languages and a constant stream of departures and reunions, the swallows are spinning, a Vespa chainsaws the sun. There is a roar (yes roar) of a shower somewhere up, under or down the hall from our room and every room. At some time we all become naked. Out on the balcony I look for a castle’s thousand-year-old towers, huge halls with wide untangled views over the sea. I know it is there, a vista somewhere away from these Mobius strip stairs, rooms that morph and open into the same rooms. Just when you think “I am awake!” the endless dream loops and takes you back again. There may have never been such an awakening. It is always morning somewhere and someone always stretches in our barely separated quarters under the eye of an engorged and rising red sun.
Tabarca This dry little island may be the eyebrow of some great prone god lying across the body of Iberia but a deceased god nonetheless. Little birds flutter up waiting for a scrap of sandwich as we revere the surrounding azure bodies that disintegrate and sink the skull of what we once worshipped. It flakes away, having pressed under our feet for so long. Nothing but the birds here are interested in us, perched under those little umbrella circles of shade— but oh, how our new azure gods soothe us. We all sleep in the sun and the wreckages of our dreams tumble in the berm of blue waters that never stop washing the dead god of dust and sand away.
I Met No One (the ghost of a forgotten Visigoth warrior poet sings) When I dream in the ancient palms of Eiche no one sings about me. Remember this: In spite of how they say I saw I felt my way as a blinded man feels his way and never finds his way. The castles are all tawny and red, they have been rocketed and maimed many times more years ago than doves can count. * I have seen into the bloody eyes of the sick and no one prays for me because I requested no prayer. I shunned the temples or did the temples with their pederast priests shun me? Their asses were stained so I went with the women whose cries crested in exhaustion and bliss. * I have not yet been to the caves. No one has been to the caves, not really, and if they say they have been they lie. I have no light for the dark; no stars or oily planets consume me. This earth it has jettisoned me. * After I am gone from here remember: I have never been as joined and fashionable and enjoyed as the others. I do not speak the language and in spite of it have rounded the petty globe until all its waters fell in my windows. I did not drown. I am not for drowning.
About this Collection A book I’ve just finished “On Earth and in Poems: the Many Lives of Al-Andalus”, by Eric Calderwood, motivated me to reread a little collection of poems I put together and Susan fashioned into a chapbook back in 2005. I plan to present these poems in Compendium: The Kitchen Sink in chunks, much the way I have published other collections of mine, like “Pearl’s Own Book of Birds” and “49 Love Poems” Calderwood’s work is an exhaustive study of the wide ranging impact of how the Muslim diaspora thinks about Al-Andalus, a time and a place that blossomed in what we westerners call the Medieval and was centered in the Iberian peninsula. He unpacks a complex and many-layered history of a culture that is considered by many to be extraordinarily gifted and diverse and is punctuated by the resolute perception of extreme levels of tolerance and cooperation between communities from all three of the Abrahamic religions… for hundreds of years until 1492 when the so-called “Catholic Monarchs”, Ferdinand and Isabella, drove out, tortured and killed, or forced conversion on any Jews and Muslims in what remained of Al-Andalus, what is now known as Andalusia in southern Spain. Regardless of the level of absolute accuracy of this perception of the enlightened nature of the culture of Al-Andalus (and Calderwood examines the nature, stresses, and internecine quarrels and conflicts between various factions and forces in the ongoing, nearly mythical persistence, of the ideas about Al-Andalus) one can hardly deny the advanced nature of the culture when compared to what was happening in the rest of Europe during the apex of Moorish dominance in Iberia. At any rate, Calderwood’s book inspired me to re-engage with the poems I wrote about my experience in Spain and particularly in Andalusia. Most of our travels in Spain were spent in the Albaicin district of Granada, the old Moorish quarter of the city, where we had an apartment. Granada was the last stronghold of the Moors in Spain. I think, however proud I was of the set of poems, I felt some reticence about them. Were they primarily tourist poems? Was I guilty of co-opting a culture I had no business speaking of in such intimate terms? I still wonder a bit about these things, but upon revisiting the poetry, I think, in the end, to negate one’s art out of fear of over stepping some ill-defined culturally mandated boundaries… one’s attempt to see and talk about a place and its people, however distant one’s own primary experience may seem to be… is to negate how related and intertwined the planet’s cultures are. I think the lessons of the reality and the dreamscape of Al-Andalus are primarily concerned with how we see one another and how we speak through the images and empathic experience of others’ histories and cultures. How we overlap and share our visions and beliefs about the world. Besides, I find I like the poems even more than I did back when I wrote and worked on them!