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.
