for Federico García Lorca
It would have been a kind of action replay,
only worse. The white handkerchiefs.
The unimaginable collapse. The day
the markets crashed and unleashed
unknowing through the New York streets
saw you transfixed, a witness in Times Square,
as the world went down in hysterical laughter
and diminishing shrieks. Then thudded over.
All hope in the gutter, blooded and lost. How you loathed
the reflections of clouds in the skyscrapers
and the glittering rings of the suicides.
It was all one in New York: the manacled roses, oil on the Hudson,
financial devastation. Had you survived,
Federico, say, Franco’s henchmen,
or the war that was to open like a demon from his person,
or the later war, and all the intervening years
between that fall of faith and this, what would you think?
Would you know what has happened here,
the way we do not know what has happened? Where
would your fury go? We shiver on the brink
of an ending, and a war stretches in front of us,
we stand where you stood. As for me,
I see the Wound-Man walking, tall and imperious,
through the streets of America, surly
and muscular, from the textbook of Paracelsus.
He’s been badly hit. There are weapons through every part of him.
A knife in the cheek, an arrow in the thigh,
someone has severed his wrist bones, on a whim,
and thrust a sword into his eye.
They’ve flung razors at his flesh to pass the time.
And yet he rears. Sturdy and impossible. Strong.
Loose in the world. And out of proportion.
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