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.