SPOT EXEGESIS

[Spain – 1973 – Franco Dictatorship]

... I, who came to live from the land of wheat and pitchers,
from the rivers, from all life, from all the winds, the sea
and the entire plateau, have seen two lies hanging from the sky,
two stars, two fountains, two different nights;
... walking through Spain was experiencing the death throes of the last bunches of grapes
- Spain for the grape harvest -
with my chest open to the red sap of humble and forgotten vines;
walking through Spain and not falling down consisted of being an owl, and mute,
and turning the waterwheel and filling buckets and spilling out my life
and making the master's garden and his conscience flourish;
... and I told myself no,
and I gambled my days and cried in the cornfields to feel freer
and closer to the land;
…the 20th century creaked beneath my feet, and with it the eternal city, the city of stone
with its customs and spirits of stone, beside the stream of water
that was drowning me;
and, meanwhile, dying here and there, breaking ideas and the pothole of boredom,
the pothole of sorrow, and the pothole of not knowing how to grasp the burning handle
of the lit candle to enter it and see;
…and I told myself that I had to break, start from something or nothing and roll,
give something to my heart, live or die, count the dead
and slip into the world;
…this has been and is the wind from the East and the West,
this is my grape harvest, the sky and the earth opened by salt and drought;
this is where I entered, this is Spain, this is where I grieve,
I bleed, and climb like seaweed until I reach the amber hue
of these restless waters beneath a rocky sea;
All the roads have been trodden, aged, and hopeless for so many travelers,
coming and going, who by day sought the rain
and by night the stars;
... how many times have I dried my shirt in the sun and drunk
from pure springs and run, to be natural, through fields of alfalfa,
wheat, and apple trees;
Did I perhaps run in solitude? Did I, from so much looking, make the world seem bigger,
and have I had to be born more and more to learn my names,
all the names, all the sadness, and the tears shed daily
by the children of Spain?
... here I stand at thirty years of life with nothing accomplished;
and I must say, I confess, that I will not miss even a single beat
of this pulse with which I am given to live this terrible blow of history.
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