Friday, June 7, 2013

Tumbling at the Nightstand


So I read a story about West Texas
that I didn’t think I’d like at first,
dusty and dry and tumbleweed gray,
but I did, and behind stood, waiting,
a poet’s Abyss, tumbling into darkness,
followed by a Spanish poet,
the Spanish poet, finding New York
before he tumbled in civil war
back home, but he wrote his poem
in two languages side by side which
makes the book shorter if you skip
the Spanish side, but it didn’t
because I read a few of them aloud
anyway, tumbling into hard consonants
and flamenco music and the tragedy
of life cut short, and I read another one
in Spanish and realized without benefit
of translation that it was a romance.

In case you’re wondering, the three books cited here are Thunder and Rain by Charles Martin, My Bright Abyss by Christian Wiman, and Poet in New York by Federico Garcia Lorca.


Photograph via The Quantum Biologist

5 comments:

Doug Spurling said...

Read Thunder & Rain, not the other two. How do you find the time?

H. Gillham said...

I don't think I could turn what's on my nightstand into a poem. How fun.

Maureen said...

Knew two of the three before I got to your note.

Love the title.

Anonymous said...

I can see the stories tumbling one into another as the books fall from the nightstand in a dream, like alice falling through the mirror into wonderland.

a joyful noise said...

Two languages side by side - Interesting and good if you know one and are learning the other!