Orality
By Jon Davis
La luz del poeta es la contradicción.
—Federico García Lorca
A chattering in the acacias.
An extralinguistic taxonomy
of grasses. Seed-tuft. Absence.
Elision as lexical strategy. As in
this silence. This shrike. This
lizard pinned to barbed-wire.
Writhing. And the black piñones
crisp against a reddening sky.
A diorama made utterly of syllables,
of the pungent musk, the squalor
and demise, the archduke
of holding still. Still in darkness
and dew. The gaps and elisions,
plastered-over and jury-rigged.
The woman above the cistern,
silver and green and gone.
And the covert operations,
the Catholic and inscrutable,
the politics a wash of gray
over everything—. The moon, now,
above the barren mountain.
That clarity. That fallacy.
The somnambulist, the only one
awake enough to see, to know—having
slumbered in the gorge, having
crossed the Guadalquivir. The rooster
would have already crowed
from the cobblestone,
the Guardia Civil already clattered
down the moon-slick streets, batons
raised, their eyes obscured
by shadow and by shadow revealed,
the syntax a narrowing alley,
fewer doors, higher windows,
the climax and denouement assured,
the knife, the red rose blossoming
now as we always knew it would
on the white silk blouse.
