Hola from Madrid. I am honored to be blog buddies with David
St. John and I share his concern about Craig Arnold. May he be found soon.
These will be brief posts until I get situated in Mojácar.
Two men in suits are hanging by their mouths—not teeth. As
though their words had literally caught them in mid-air. Or is it they are
hanging on their words:
so
much depends
upon .
. .
what is pendant.
This is the sculpture in a retrospective for Juan Muñoz that
transfixed me in my jetlagged, sleepless haze at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid. It didn’t strike me
as a scene of torture, but a willful participation by the figures. But of course, many have been hung because of their words. Now mind
you, I was very very jetlagged yesterday. And I hope not much will hang on
these words I am writing. But as a poet, I do hang by my words, hang onto
words.
Today I strolled through Retiro Park. Inside the Crystal Palace, an empty glass house, with nothing in it but the installation “Are
Animals People?” which consisted of two stuffed animals hanging from the
ceiling: a panda and a large brown rat that looked like a bear. Occasionally
roaring sounds would emerge from somewhere. All I could think about were the
two women last night in a tapas bar who were chatting and drinking and smoking,
oblivious to the huge cured slabs of ham hanging just above their heads.
Strolling through
a crowd of people in the Puerta del Sol, a main plaza in Madrid, I chanced to
look up and saw a plaque honoring Jorge Luis Borges, who had written some of
his first poems in the building. As I stood there staring up at the ceramic
plaque (trying to photograph it, unsuccessfully), I felt so at home. A poet had
lived and written here. Why do we/I derive comfort from such things? Perhaps
because in the face of so much invisibility, here was confirmation that poetry
survives. Or tonight, walking home from a Flamenco Carmen, I see several lines of poetry by Quevedo have be incised in gold in the pavement. I’ve never been a person who likes to visit the graves of writers I
admire. I’d much rather see where they worked and lived. And so I feel
heartened by the traces of writers that I find throughout the world.