CHRISTOPHER
BUCKLEY
Lost Sky
MAHON, MENORCA
100 miles in any direction and
the
sky still has plenty of time,
and so is in no hurry to remember,
offer
a clue
as to which life this is—
sauntering
along
in a fine straw hat, summer trousers, and shirt
the color of stones lining the cart-wide streets,
anonymous against the faded building sides,
where the caneries and finches—set out
in their twig cages for the sun—and I
whistle
pieces
of an aria beneath the unencumbered roofs,
thinking perhaps in terms of the heart,
of stones absolved by the sea. . .
Winter is hardly anything
here,
a white
midday moon, a sliver of ice on the blue
is as close as it comes—
a
wind
is serious every so often,
the
hills shrug
their shoulders beneath their old coats
of chamomile and fennel,
each
morning a mist
of acquiescence lifting out to sea. . .
And
soon
the green shutters will close after the lunch hour,
late,
and there, where a bright breeze breaks
off the bay
igniting the high garden wall,
you turn once more to praise the loquats and gold
hibiscus,
hands
over your eyes like a prisoner
just released into the blinding light of noon. . .
But now the linnets have abandoned the leafless
civic trees, their branches
pointing
every
which way above the horizon.
4:00,
the city dead
asleep, and you find yourself at the tables
in front of the American Bar,
waiting
reasonably,
as is the custom, for the waiter on duty
to stub his cigarette and set,
reluctantly,
next to your folded Herald Tribune,
a glass of fino, as thinly amber
as
the coattails of daylight
trailing over the roof tiles
to
the west,
where, for a minute or two, all the old
theologies circle,
like
pigeons, like rings
of the elect, to the sky—
like
the remedies of dust,
dispensed each day
at
this time from the stuffed pockets
of the ragman,
shuffling
alley to street, a man
of apparent contentment, who smiles and tips
his sun-bleached captain’s hat
each
time
he sees you, God-knows-what in the sacks
on his creaking cart.
You
have half a dozen phrases
to fall back on—
one
for him in the afternoon,
and one for the newsstand,
tabacalera,
fish market,
and the bar—
one
for the past you say to no one,
but that old high Latin
will
get you nowhere now—
not comfortably back down the burning
road to home,
or
to the Augustine City of God, and who
would you recognize there,
though
you speak,
beneath your breath to someone
beyond
the shops,
someone not among the shopping crowds
soon drifting down the streets?
At
5:00 as the lights
snap on
across from
you, only the usual
ghosts of the evening hour return—
sparrows
the color
of October, chorusing in praise
of
the constellations,
the offering of crumbs
wind-blown
on the chairs
and ground. . .
and
in the pines at sunset,
that
region
of memory
dimming
once again with a longing
for
something
as indeterminate as the latticwork of clouds,
a
plume
of black smoke dissolving
into
the last striations
of the blue,
as
it exhales through your bones and skin
and you begin again
the
little poem of the soul, recalling the lines
for the spirit
at
last content somewhere, floating
through
the streets
aimed no higher finally than the sugared light,
sparkling
in the bakery windows—
steam,
bright
thread rising,
unraveling
through
the increasingly familiar dark.
Star Apocrypha,
Northwestern University Press 2001.
