Monday evening.
So…now what?
The apartment is clean and empty. It’s ready for a new rental, just as my landlord had promised at the end of April. Everything is the same as I’d left it, in those heady days where nothing seemed to go right and anything was an excuse for an emotional outpouring.
(more…)
I.
One last meal at the family table, before
we part ways. Noodles bathing in a boiling pot,
I unwind lines of wisdom my grandfather leaves
me. "You are more talented, have always been more(more…)
talented than you would tell yourself. I saw this
when you were young, when beneath the lush mango groves
At the Museu Picasso
One watches the world for the first time.(more…)
Another unfolds what
the first sees,
I didn’t know what to expect of Barcelona before I arrived. All I knew was that it’s Spain’s second largest city; that it lies somewhere on the western edge of the Mediterranean; that its residents mostly speak Catalan; and that it’s home to one of the world’s most successful football clubs (which is, of course, mès que un club). Granted, this is probably more background info than I would’ve needed to explore the city regardless.
Now that we’ve been here for two days, though, I realize that everything we’ve seen—well, almost everything—resembles someplace else I’ve been. Like the train ride here from Madrid, I keep experiencing déjà vu, seeing sights and features in Barcelona that look as though they’d been transplanted from another of my travels. The Arc de Triomf? You know it’s spelled with a -phe, right? The Passeig de Gràcia? Isn’t that Catalan for “Champs Elysées?” That beautiful wrought balcony—haven’t I seen it in Brussels before…
And on it goes, with almost every passing moment, until I start to wonder: what if Barcelona were a city of mirrors? Or better yet: what if it were a city of metaphors—a record of reminders where I’ve been, a sprawling repository of familiar sights in new settings?
(more…)At the Sagrada Familia, for S. L.
It’s such a strange structure,(more…)
this tower built by the ‘archi-
tect of God,’ that the mixture
and mess of wrought sculpture
defying every law of nature
conceals what’s in the picture
and isn’t—the birds.
I’m not one, typically, for narratives. Sequences matter, and causes can do much to explain effects. But on principle, I place more trust in the randomness of events, and I prefer to see my life (as I once told G. C.) as a series of happy accidents. To stay within the realm of the literary just a little bit longer: this is what drew me to the realm of lyric, that way of understanding and expressing a state (an idea, an emotion, a memory) in a given moment.
These days, however, the coincidences and correspondences I see around me feel too interrelated—too convenient—for me to dismiss as mere random events. Traveling and living in three different regions of the world over the past year, it seems, has a way of compressing time and space so pointedly that metaphor (this reminds me of that one time…) is the only way to process some of the stranger familiarities I’ve encountered.
All of which, I guess, is a long way of saying that there was something uncanny—and ultimately moving—about the train ride my family and I took from Madrid to Barcelona yesterday morning.
(more…)
there was a time when you were younger when the pressing of bodies against yours terrified you and honestly speaking it still does to an extent since every body brings with it heat and force and sound and of course you’d prefer to eat sardines than be one of them simmering in the masses
(more…)For my grandparents
Cold tangerine(more…)
on
a glass table.
the first principle
of composition
(i hear them say)
is knowing what is there
It is one thing(more…)
to study his work
closely, trying
to hear the music
of his Muse
who animated
the artist’s use
of color shaded
and thickly spread
in joyful strokes
where one can read
his living speech.
Between Two Rivers 