Major Jackson

for Mark Strand La Barraca Blues Suite/i. Beneath canopies of green, unionists marched doggedly outside The Embassy. Their din was no match for light lancing through leaves of madrone trees lining the Paseo then flashing off glossy black Maybachs skidding round a plaza like a monarch fleeing the paparazzi. Your voice skipped and paused like a pencil. Layers of morning pastries flaked gingerly then fell, soft as vowels, on a china plate. One learns to cherish the wizened reserve of old world manners, two blotched hands making wings of a daily paper beside us between sips of café con leche, a demeanor in short gentle as grand edifaces along this boulevard. Yet Guernica is down the street, and some windshields wear a sinister face, sometimes two. Think Goya. Just south of here, on the lower slopes of the Sierras, fields of olive groves braid the land like a Moorish head, but those sultans were kicked out long ago. In the lobby of the Hotel Urban, I wait for a cab, my obedient rolling bag like a pet beside me. I have loved again another city but Madrid is yours: her caped olés, her bullish flag, her glass pavilions and outdoor tables like a festival of unbroken laughter, our dark harbors, finding level. ii. Salobreña That stretch of mountains features white windmill blades whose slow turns are rifles aiming, for I cannot help but think of Lorca's killing between here and the village Alfaçar, and the firing squad's gun pops are that Flamencan dancer's heel stomps. I bring back, too, her brisk hand claps and the cantor's Andalusian moans like dried sticks, or bones crumbling in his throat. Only souvenir shops and steep winding streets accrete in this region's stacked brochures.   Her dress spills across the restaurant's floor like a red shadow, darker than billboards of black bulls high above roadways, motionless but seeming to gallop like Franco's brigades. All seeing is an act of war. Tanks and artillery or Spanish castles and mosques? I choose to lose, and beneath a watercolorist's sky study Didi's splendor, nude against the unruffled backdrop of the Alboran Sea whose waves match my sighs and bomb this beach, launching sprays of white duds. iii. Córdoba, Mezquita Even if he'd pulled over to study Andalusia's road signs, after one thousand and one nights, he still could not make out its calligraphic script, its vertical lines, its dots, marks like smoke stilled from incense, its curled sand soft Arabic, but this city's voice has coffins and carnations, and its hoarse singing shoots through him like twelve bars of earthen road that lengthens into a labyrinth of knowing blood beneath black skin. More echoes: the Alhambra sent him back to the seraglio of his youth where a Moorish guard stood in a museum, unfazed by a harem's rising laughter behind palace doors. Here are pillars and banded arches to once again imagine the body passing through like a key into infinity. Was this the answer to his ghetto past? But why travel so far? Since a child, even in sleep, he voyaged and broke free, tossing dice in dreams, once below deck on a caravel next to grains of paradise. He's collecting a thousand faces. He's moving beneath eyelids, turning time into flesh. Don't judge him. The courtyard's orange trees where once he washed like a morisco are teaching his tongue the craft.

How untouchable the girls arm-locked strutting up the main hall of Central High unopposed for decades looked. I flattened myself against the wall, unnerved by their cloudsea of élan, which pounced upon any timid girl regrettably in their way, their high-wattage lifting slow motion like curls of light strands of honey. The swagger behind their blue-tinted sunglasses and low-rider jeans hurt boys like me, so vast the worlds between us, even the slightest whiff of recognition, an accidental side glance, an unintended tongue-piercing display of Juicy Fruit chew, was intoxicating and could wildly cast a chess-playing geek into a week-long surmise of inner doubts, likelihoods, and depressions. You might say my whole life led to celebrating youth and how it snubs and rebuffs. Back then I learned to avoid what I feared and to place my third-string hopes on a game-winning basketball shot, sure it would slow them to a stop, pan their lip-glossed smiles, blessing me with their cool.

My neighbor is velvety and kicks serious game. So sweet garlic refuses to hang tight in his mouth. He pulls women to his wide chest each time as if he's won the Lotto. He rocks them gently and gentler. My neighbor is a master spooner. He knows not of desire, but only the rules of engagement. He says,I miss having Skype on all night so I can listen to your breathing. He floats in his museum, of gams, drifting from frame to frame.

This downpour of bad reasoning, this age-old swarm, this buzzing about town, this kick and stomp through gardens, this snag on the way to the mall, this heap and toss of fabric and strewn shoes, this tangled beauty, this I came here not knowing, here to be torched, this fumbling ecstasy, this ecstasy of fumbling, this spray of lips and fingers, this scrape of bone, this raid of private grounds, this heaving and rocking, this scream and push, this sightless hunger, this tattered perishing, this rhythmic teeth knocking, this unbearable music, this motionless grip, grimace, and groan.

As though undreaming the mountain from the sea or tweezering hands from a watch, a quick-fix change of regimes: a democracy lost to a monarchy, an empty sudden village, and elsewhere the wedding party lining up like a lost tribe of refugees. As though a reverse whisper of vows into a pageant of elegant ears when the heat in the O cooled its "till death do us" and the storm inside seething below the flowers, gowns, and cake, its own Institution.

I have not disappeared. The boulevard is full of my steps. The sky is full of my thinking. An archbishop prays for my soul, even though we met only once, and even then, he was busy waving at a congregation. The ticking clocks in Vermont sway back and forth as though sweeping up my eyes and my tattoos and my metaphors, and what comes up are the great paragraphs of dust, which also carry motes of my existence. I have not disappeared. My wife quivers inside a kiss. My pulse was given to her many times, in many countries. The chunks of bread we dip in olive oil is communion with our ancestors, who also have not disappeared. Their delicate songs I wear on my eyelids. Their smiles have given me freedom which is a crater I keep falling in. When I bite into the two halves of an orange whose cross-section resembles my lungs, a delta of juices burst down my chin, and like magic, makes me appear to those who think I've disappeared. It's too bad war makes people disappear like chess pieces, and that prisons turn prisoners into movie endings. When I fade into the mountains on a forest trail, I still have not disappeared, even though its green façade turns my arms and legs into branches of oak. It is then I belong to a southerly wind, which by now you have mistaken as me nodding back and forth like a Hasid in prayer or a mother who has just lost her son to gunfire in Detroit. I have not disappeared. In my children, I see my bulging face pressing further into the mysteries. In a library in Tucson, on a plane above Buenos Aires, on a field where nearby burns a controlled fire, I am held by a professor, a general, and a photographer. One burns a finely wrapped cigar, then sniffs the scented pages of my books, scouring for the bitter smell of control. I hold him in my mind like a chalice. I have not disappeared. I swish the amber hue of lager on my tongue and ponder the drilling rigs in the Gulf of Alaska and all the oil-painted plovers. When we talk about limits, we disappear. In Jasper, TX you can disappear on a strip of gravel. I am a life in sacred language. Termites toil over a grave, and my mind is a ravine of yesterdays. At a glance from across the room, I wear September on my face, which is eternal, and does not disappear even if you close your eyes once and for all simultaneously like two coffins.

If I told you Earl, the toughest kid on my block in North Philadelphia, bow-legged and ominous, could beat any man or woman in ten moves playing white, or that he traveled to Yugoslavia to frustrate the bearded masters at the Belgrade Chess Association, you'd think I was given to hyperbole, and if, at dinnertime, I took you into the faint light of his Section 8 home reeking of onions, liver, and gravy, his six little brothers fighting on a broken love-seat for room in front of a cracked flat-screen, one whose diaper sags it's a wonder it hasn't fallen to his ankles, the walls behind doors exposing the sheetrock the perfect O of a handle, and the slats of stairs missing where Baby-boy gets stuck trying to ascend to a dominion foreign to you and me with its loud timbales and drums blasting down from the closed room of his cousin whose mother stands on a corner on the other side of town all times of day and night, except when her relief check arrives at the beginning of the month, you'd get a better picture of Earl's ferocity after-school on the board in Mr. Sherman's class, but not necessarily when he stands near you at a downtown bus-stop in a jacket a size too small, hunching his shoulders around his ears, as you imagine the checkered squares of his poverty and anger, and pray he does not turn his precise gaze too long in your direction for fear he blames you and proceeds to take your Queen.

1 When you have forgotten (to bring into Play that fragrant morsel of rhetoric, Crisp as autumnal air), when you Have forgotten, say, sunlit corners, brick Full of skyline, rowhomes, smokestacks, Billboards, littered rooftops & wondered What bread wrappers reflect of our hunger, 2 When you have forgotten wide-brimmed hats, Sunday back-seat leather rides & church, The doorlock like a silver cane, the broad backs Swaying or the great moan deep churning, & the shimmer flick of flat sticks, the lurch Forward, skip, hands up Aileyesque drop, When you have forgotten the meaningful bop, 3 Hustlers and their care-what-may, blasé Ballet and flight, when you have forgotten Scruffy yards, miniature escapes, the way Laundry lines strung up sag like shortened Smiles, when you have forgotten the Fish Man Barking his catch in inches up the street “I’ve got porgies. I’ve got trout. Feeesh 4 Man,” or his scoop and chain scale, His belief in shad and amberjack; when You have forgotten Ajax and tin pails, Blue crystals frothing on marble front Steps Saturday mornings, or the garden Of old men playing checkers, the curbs White-washed like two lines out to the burbs, 5 Or the hopscotch squares painted new In the street, the pitter-patter of feet Landing on rhymes. “How do you Like the weather, girls? All in together, girls, January, February, March, April... ” The jump ropes’ portentous looming, Their great, aching love blooming. 6 When you have forgotten packs of grape- Flavored Now & Laters, the squares Of sugar flattening on the tongue, the elation You felt reaching into the corner-store jar, Grasping a handful of Blow Pops, candy bars With names you didn’t recognize but came To learn. All the turf battles. All the war games. 7 When you have forgotten popsicle stick Races along the curb and hydrant fights, Then, retrieve this letter from your stack I’ve sent by clairvoyant post & read by light, For it brought me as much longing and delight. This week’s Father’s Day; I’ve a long ride to Philly. I’ll give this to Gramps, then head to Black Lily.