On my patio, a fly and I are
reading Federico Garcia Lorca.
My eyes lift words from the page.
The fly lands,
walks among letters, commas,
puzzles at a question mark,
trips over four syllable words,
walks, not reads, between lines.
The fly knows neither the word aqua or water
but knows water’s aboriginal wetness,
fluid, cool, sudden, moist,
a lexicon without words,
a language becoming foreign to me.
The fly moves across the page tasting
the ink and paper portion of the poem,
but I believe not the substance.
The ink stands off the pulp page surface.
The fly climbs up over the name Lorca
as I climb down into Lorca’s Andalusian duende.*
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*Duende: a word naming the raw emotional impact certain songs and dances have on the soul. Of duende, the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca writes: “everything that has black sounds in it, has duende. . . . It is the mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher explains. Duende is the spirit of the earth. . . . The duende’s arrival always means a radical change in forms. It brings to old planes unknown feelings of freshness, with the quality of something newly created, like a miracle, and it produces an almost religious enthusiasm. . . . All arts are capable of duende, but where it finds greatest range, naturally, is in music, dance, and spoken poetry, for these arts require a living body to interpret them, being forms that are born, die, and open their contours against an exact present.”