The Lorca Variations (I) “Lorca’s Spain: A Homage”

1931 –

2024

Beginning with olive trees.
			   		     Shadows.
Beginning with roosters.
				       	     Crystal.
Beginning with castanets & almonds.
					     Fishes.
This is a homage to Spain.
This mists dogs.
This silences rubber.
This is Saturn.
Beginning with yellow.
					     Eclipse.
Beginning with needles.
					     Insomnia.
Beginning with baskets.
					     The Moon.
Who is naked? The imagination
(wrote Lorca) is seared.
This is a homage to water.
Beginning & end.

45 I Give Up My Identity

My name is smaller
than it sounds.
I work & polish it
until a light
shines through.
I thrust a thorn under 
my tongue.
I drop the little stones
behind me. Striding
I can feel my height extend
up to the rafters.
My voice is thin,
still thinner
is the space between
my footsteps
& the earth.
I do not want you
calling me
except at the allotted
times. I scratch my head
because I know
it's empty.

Jerome Rothenberg

2003

Lorca Variation 34 A Book of Hours

3:00 P.M.

The green man, more a man
than most, took a scissors,
cut the sky with it,
let a river loose
till it became
a sea, the way that yellow
turns to gold,
his scissors tore its blue
apart, his lips
grown pale with dust,
the branches broke
& from the west a man rode up,
who saw the west in ruins,
Pan sat with a zither
heaping sadness upon sadness
earth upon air
until the sun itself was lost,
the air as murky
as the soul of man
he bathes in it
he sits inside
a molten pool
a catherine wheel spins overhead
a hundred pinwheels


6:00 P.M.

They set the snake loose
where the weather

Jerome Rothenberg

1996

The Lorca Variations (XXVIII) “For Turtles”

[1]

Up there—or down here
for that matter—the screams
rush around us
Ellipses dismember the tower
of Babel, crapulent city,
enraged zigzag women still sit in
with feathers, on porticos
Men with pale foreheads
shout poems from its rooftops,
crushing its grasses,
city that’s buried in words,
like “cypress” & “daylight”
“up there” & “down here”


[2]

My heart is flying from me
—see it fly—
& rising in a spiral,
like a star,
a spiral rising past the Cape
obliquely,
like a neon heart,
celestial turtle set before the pope,
until the turtle & the star
drop back to earth,
to te

Jerome Rothenberg

1993

Poems

The Lorca Variations (I) “Lorca’s Spain: A Homage”

More by this poet

45 I Give Up My Identity

Lorca Variation 34 A Book of Hours

The Lorca Variations (XXVIII) “For Turtles”

Poems

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The Lorca Variations (I) “Lorca’s Spain: A Homage”

More by this poet

45 I Give Up My Identity

Lorca Variation 34 A Book of Hours

The Lorca Variations (XXVIII) “For Turtles”

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