spain – Page 50 – don't confuse the narrator

July heat

This piece has been in my drafts file/notebook for years and has never really seemed to ‘gel’*. Still, given its provisional title, if I don’t post it today, I might end up waiting another year before I decide to do anything with it.

July

Heat swells to stuff the corners
of the room, tucking itself up
to pad the picture rail, deadening
the walls. We lie at the edges
of a king-sized bed, white cotton
smooth beneath us. You reach across
and touch me. Sweat breaks
under the weight of your hand.

(*perhaps if it weren’t so hot in Spain in the summer, things would gel better, but when the writer herself feels as if she’s melting, it’s not that easy to concentrate and get poetry to its final setting point.)

censorship, censure and nonsense

An email with the subject line ‘escultura censurada’ caught my attention a couple of days ago and had me wondering whether the sculpture in question had been censured or censored.

Reading on, I think both verbs were appropriate.
Continue reading “censorship, censure and nonsense”

madrid heat

I had to make a quick visit to Madrid yesterday to sign some papers, but fled back to the village as quickly as I could. A considerable amount of the time I was in the city was actually spent travelling on the metro.

This poem dates from at least six years ago, but I remembered it as the air-conditioning on the metro doesn’t seem to have improved at all.

Fat Woman on the Metro

Her fan is silk and lace – a butterfly
whose coloured wings flick
and furl coquettishly. Crimplene
caresses curves as tenderly
as any lover’s hand; she wears pearls
of sweat at wrist and neck.

‘a tower to the sun’

castillos en el aire – ilusiones lisonjeras con poco o ningún fundamento

I wonder how many Spaniards realise that as well as building castles in the air, English speakers also build castles in Spain.

Perhaps more to the point, I wonder why we do.

Brewer tells me that

[…] air-castles were called by the French Châteaux d’Espagne because Spain has no châteaux.

I wonder who told him that yarn.
Continue reading “‘a tower to the sun’”

blues composition

When I reached for the camera to take this picture, I think there were actually four cats on the steps and it should have been titled ‘black and blue’, but the other three are younger, more agile and less amenable to having things pointed at them.