Wishes at Seven p.m. in Valencia, Spain

                        --for Donna, Laura, Lynne and Melanie

 

You asked me to bring you back nothing

from the Mediterranean coast, where everything

is heavy with history, even dirt, but I wanted

to bring you el color of evening after a day

of scorching summer wind throwing thorns

into everybody’s eyes, the way the past can fling,

blister and blind. How we carry it heavy as

dirt on our backs, in our bellies, scarred

in our hearts. I want to bring you the horse

of late afternoon as it bridles the wind to breeze.

 

The azul deepens, grows silver-headed here.

Evening rides in, wearing a gauzy blue top

cool as Arabian tiles, and just as wistful.

Even the statues, cast like shadows, could

be dirt at this hour, sprayed salty wet from

the turquoise of ocean and palm breeze. Everything

feels so forever—back and forth in time, this

coast knows 71 BC; it remembers the eighth century,

while we meanwhile blast through our years, 2000,

and 01, two, five, soon 2010, our own quick, dirty swirl

 

of oil on the streets, and someone is shooting

off fireworks now, always a party in the Spanish dark,

sky fire, stars against inky night. Here’s what I’ll bring

you back: the thought of dirt, longing among electrified

blues, lavanda crushed fragrant in my palm, El Greco’s

elongated figures like stretched shadows, a flamenco

wail; a distillation of that water colored indigo sky in

a silver-carved djenn bottle, fragrance of our hard

working essential oils over all these centuries. So you

can whiff this elixir of the not so forever world.