Duende

                1.

The earth is dry and they live wanting.

Each with a small reservoir

Of furious music heavy in the throat.  

They drag it out and with nails in their feet

Coax the night into being.  Brief believing.  

A skirt shimmering with sequins and lies.

And in this night that is not night,

Each word is a wish, each phrase

A shape their bodies ache to fill—

             I’m going to braid my hair

         Braid many colors into my hair

             I’ll put a long braid in my hair

         And write your name there

They defy gravity to feel tugged back.

The clatter, the mad slap of landing.

                2.

And not just them.  Not just

The ramshackle family, the tios,

Primitos, not just the bailaor

Whose heels have notched 

And hammered time

So the hours flow in place

Like a tin river, marking

Only what once was.

Not just the voices scraping

Against the river, nor the hands

nudging them farther, fingers

like blind birds, palms empty,

echoing.  Not just the women

with sober faces and flowers

in their hair, the ones who dance

as though they're burying

memory—one last time—

beneath them.

      And I hate to do it here.

To set myself heavily beside them.

Not now that they’ve proven

The body a myth, parable

For what not even language 

Moves quickly enough to name.

If I call it pain, and try to touch it

With my hands, my own life,

It lies still and the music thins,

A pulse felt for through garments.

If I lean into the desire it starts from—

If I lean unbuttoned into the blow

Of loss after loss, love tossed

Into the ecstatic void—

It carries me with it farther,

To chords that stretch and bend

Like light through colored glass.

But it races on, toward shadows

Where the world I know 

And the world I fear

Threaten to meet.

                3.

There is always a road,

The sea, dark hair, dolor.

Always a question

Bigger than itself—

    They say you’re leaving Monday

    Why can’t you leave on Tuesday?