Nicholas Skaldetvind
30 July 2021 II Version
A drop of water under the microscopic sky
a verity my eye, and I
am enacting a waterfall
with my tongue where
once there was
a wave now there
is not the taste of salt so much
sea collapsing again, yes
this much so, and intimately
My years on Madrid sidewalks living
with the dry air day after day. Fading into those stretches
of escape. Coming to life again before everyone dancing
as I watched the clouds foregather lightning above the mountains.
Thinking of myself as a fluid abstraction climbing
the university’s iron steps, seeing
long beaches in Valencia the day after tomorrow
and the palm shrouds floundering in the warm rain.
My pleasure of being alone and merging with the ease I once
felt around loud women. Years later thinking about them
pacing Alameda before the unfolding shores in Manzanita.
In Oregon memories make me seedy and important to someone somewhere else
where day shudders with old neon of last night
which Tio Pepe tells. Spain ecstatic at what would come next
after a successful recession and world cup. Yes. Me falling into a line of friends,
and only kind of. Those wild nights at Kapital and La Riviera in keeping with this
noisy earth. Those quiet
iron steps where I was always alone. Yes. Lake effect snow over
the forests throttling the Finger Lakes everywhere as I lumbered
and stalled in the awkward parting of my youth one continent away and all stood
close while the storming waters and fanfare went on and on. Yes.
Ah my friends from Pacific to Baltic to Red, it was the sweet time
of our lives, the loud sound of thunderous applause about stadiums
and angry streets ill at ease through all of it knowing
our time with our one love was going her own way
under the wings of someone else’s hips and moaning. That breezy terraza looked
into the mountains beyond the city, and far below
Madrid sparkled like a cheap jewel, beautiful and jagged under
the late autumn warmth between that and this, between
that yes and this maybe, between the forgotten girl shivering
by the lake’s calming shore and the forgotten pain and the consequence.
Yes. Those lovely afternoons long ago which I forgot to notice
growing more and more dim, now apparent in me, like a boy
surfacing from the bluest water in America, wide-eyed and unsure and loved and loud,
yes like me singing this song to praise her to remember me
A drift of language and memory
in a dizzying procession of an ocean’s bounds
interpenetrating the coiled length of water absent
with closed lungs remaining
like poetry in this swelling end of the world ambiance.
I disappear over the crest of a wave for seconds at a time
but about that wave and memory am I
the only bond
between the two.
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