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Lorquiana

By Miles Waggener     After Lorca

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   “Even the most faithful student of my work will be hard put
   to decide what is and what is not García Lorca as, indeed, he
   would if he were to look into my present resting place.”
                                   —JACK SPICER from After Lorca

   “las cosas la están mirando/y ella no puede mirarlas”
                                   —from Lorca's "Romance Sonámbulo"


Away from Granada
    into a tunnel
        the bus drove us north
            to Alfacar and Víznar,
across the bare legs
    of a girl beside me,
        a birthmark spread
            as she looked out the window,
where the cars became
    prayer beads
        pressed into green hills--
            and smoke twisted in the groves.
Your story I brought
    was a cord on a cudgel,
        a cat o nine tales,
            a car in burned in the road.
In the glare of the village,
    the car trailered horses,
        air turned to albumen,
            boiled far too long.
Bulletproof tunnel,
    tunnel of stone,
        tunnel beneath the mountain.
Stardust glimmer, film
    pulled from old cameras,
        the road’s lacerating reach
            brought us right to the flames.
I searched through your footage.
    I held my phone to the carnage.
        I watched with the others
            as everything burned.
Small steel balls stitched
    into black leather,
        your story kept teaching
            I would forget.
Then into the city and into a tunnel
    the bus drove away
        from Alfacar and Víznar
            to Casa Rosales
now Hotel Christina
    where a waiter named Juani
        said they took you from the stairs.
You were dapper in cardboard,
    in a grainy white suit,
        life-size but bent--
            someone punched you in the mouth.
I found luminous fruit,
    a mechanized juicer,
        duplicating hells
            of gambling machines.
Bulletproof tunnel,
    tunnel of stone
        tunnel of all-night pharmacies,
Juani’s lit up at the waist
    spooning pulpo en vinagre,
        framed in neon and chrome.
            Was Lorca ever here?
He said Lorca’s on the roof
    with transmitter tuned to Moscow,
        I'll give you a ladder,
            Lorca’s waiting for you there.
So I laughed a little harder
    when a throat-less man laughed,
        I brought to my face
            medallions of cold flamenqín.
Back into the tunnel,
    the bus drove us deeper,
        a wall of blue phones
            began ringing in my ears.
Down the oncoming lane
    the girl was still tethered
        barefoot with horses--
            her lesson kept teaching I would forget
that at the end of each road,
    stitched in black pixels
        among them my faces,
            were bits of bone, shell and teeth.
Bulletproof tunnel,
    tunnel of stone,
        tunnel beneath the mountain,
we surfaced in the groves
    between Alfacar
        and Víznar to find the wreckage was cleared.



MILES WAGGENER is the author of two poetry collections--Phoenix Suites, winner of the Washington Prize, and Sky Harbor—as well as the chapbooks Portents Aside and Afterlives. He lives in Omaha.