Duende
An hour inland from Bangor, Maine,
over rolling hills, in an oval pasture
surrounded by giant conifers,
the forest floor bejeweled
with ruby-studded mushrooms,
I watch the sheep sing,
if bleating could be called a song.
Maybe someone in a grove long ago
saw a man attached to a beast
of burden and so the concept
of the satyr was born. Memory is
the past reversed. I once
went out with a sailor, a Spaniard,
from Andalucía. We met at sea
where I worked the roulette wheel
in the ship’s casino. His legs
were slightly bowed, his voice
gruff and torn, and when he came
the sound seemed to climb up
not from his throat but from his feet
smelling of earth and sea and grief—
a deep song Lorca called duende.
It wasn’t pretty. His blue and red
and purple briefs soaking in a bucket
by the cabin door. He told me once
when he was a boy his grandmother
had caught him trying to fuck
a chicken. The poor chicken,
he laughed, his saddle-worn Andalucían
laugh, feathers flying everywhere, his
grandmother screaming. And what
to call those half-human, half-chicken
kinds of days: scratching and clawing
at the earth, bathed in dust,
trying not to think about the simmering
anise, peppercorn, and broth.
When I visited him, he met me
at the airport. Then the long train
ride south through field after field
of sunflowers. Por la tarde families
paraded, por la noche, only men
and boys and extranjeras—foreign women—
out past sunset. In an empty disco six
or seven guys danced, throwing themselves
around madly, slamming into each
other to Blondie’s “Heart of Glass.”
Franco had died a few years back.
From my window that night, a full moon,
shadows of the town square, the boarded-up
cathedral, a cat in heat, the smell
of blood oranges. In the morning
his grandmother, all in black,
asleep stooped in a chair outside
my door. Nearby the ruins of an ancient
Roman temple, goats on hind legs
eating the pale green leaves from olive trees.
Copyright Credit: Catherine Bowman, "Duende" from Can I Finish, Please?. Copyright © 2016 by Catherine Bowman. Reprinted by permission of Four Way Books, www.fourwaybooks.com.
Source: Can I Finish, Please? (Four Way Books, 2016)