Anniversary in Ronda, Andalusia
Lesson twenty-two of the app and I’ve learned to say
nothing useful—You eat apples. I am not a man.
Dogs bark back and forth across the Tajo gorge—Hola,
Hola. Your heart quivers, pulse dips, as we trek
to the house and hanging gardens of the Moorish king, never
the house and gardens of the Moorish king—more proof
that frauds should, at least, be charming. The real magic:
the house and gardens were built over the remains of
a marvel of 14th century Islamic engineering—a water wheel
cut deep into the cliffside. We descend into this mine
with little understanding of where we’re headed. Our usual.
Twenty stories down slick and uneven stone steps hacked
into the dim, past the Armory, the Room of Secrets. We pause
on each landing so you can catch your breath; your heart is an
apple and time is hungry. At the bottom, we step into
the sun, our images photoshopped ageless
in the silver river. My knee aches. Maybe it’s the muscle,
maybe the cancer. Aún no, Aún no. Legends tell us the Moors
were also betrayed by one of their own, who told
the Catholic kings how to take the city. The traitors
and kings are gone now, replaced by new kings, men
that would be. We contain the seeds of our undoing.
Pointless to say, so we don’t: our music is fleeting,
the strum of a lute, a guitar echoing through a canyon,
the trills of a diving starling. Do I have this right: Tu corazón es
una manzana y yo tengo hambre? The dogs bark across the gorge,
I love you, I love you.
Cento: Dying Is Fine, with Writing Prompts
Don’t wait for inspiration, write as if you were
dying. Dying's miraculous, ribbon of hunger
coming and going in the seconds between wind and
wave, the hours between dawns, back-boned sea
creature white as angels, its own
mistborn ghost.
here is the magic word:
translucent
When you hurt me, I ran into a new year,
running, always running, swimming, gulping,
spitting bubbles, nervous system trip-
tripping along, furious, metastable, brain-
tricked to implacability, smell like the chem lab
at school. My doctor’s name is not your
name and we don't now and never did lie to
each other. Like a shipwreck we die sinking
in our own seas, and, words forked,
don’t speak of sadness.
here is the magic word:
cancer
(This is where the poem holds its breath.)
I will call you
Doxorubicin, Zofran, Xanax, Zoloft
I will call you
black milk, bone pain, skull bare, slip skin
I will call you
dirge
Overheard in a hospital: your silence will
not protect you, time for your medication.
Meditation: Baby, I wouldn’t like Death
if Death were filled with dark chocolate
cake. I wouldn’t like Death if Death were a
honeycomb heavy with bees, brought down
from a cool sighing mountain. Death is
strictly artificial, like a barking where there
are no dogs. The look Death gives
is green, blazes in the meanest deep.
Write as if you were a rock or a tree.
There are graveyards that are lonely.
here are the magic words:
writer’s block
It’s odd to come back, thin after surgery—
no mouth, no tongue, no throat—imagination
a withered leaf. Write as if you were a dog as
only dogs know how to be happy; sometimes
the sound of his breathing saves my life. Of
the many deaths that hunker inside, this one
bleeds the least. There are no good good-byes.
Write a post-apocalyptic dungeon crawl.
Write your own obituary. Write as if
you have five seconds to come up
with the perfect last word.
With language gathered and remixed from Allen Ginsberg, Audre Lorde, Maureen Seaton, Lucille Clifton, Pablo Neruda, Kamilah Aisha Moon, James Merrill, Edna St. Vincent Millay, e.e. cummings, Langston Hughes, Jane Kenyon, Dylan Thomas, Ángel Gonzáles, Michael McClure, and prompts from Annie Dillard, Supersummary.com, and Commaful.com.
