22
THE VOLUNTEER, WINTER 1997-98
He carried the black
night of Madrid everywhere, memorized
each star, slept under those immutable stones,
their luminous weight whispering his name
in that strange tongue, a Spanish that spoke
to him only of death.
Dreams
came to him: fragments, friends, bullets:
arms, legs, heads, voices ceasing in the middle
of a phrase. Night after night, the speechless
battle raged. He would wake to the darkness
then wait to ensure the sun
would come. Perhaps, in the quiet of the dawn
he thought he might hear his fallen comrades
in the songs of the lark, understand what once
they started to say, the words they began to utter
in Spain.
He wrote in his neat notebook:
"Men dying in battle speak after speech has failed."
After Spain he knew how poor he'd always be, how he
could never be sure of meaning, never believe
the inevitable words he uttered to friends when
they came calling his name. He breathed, yet knew
himself dead. He'd died in the battle for Spain
the same way workers died in factories or infields,
not all at once, not whole, the machine sanding off
the flesh, the bone, the heart, a little at a time,
their bodies ceasing to be
before they ever died.
After Spain
there were never enough blankets in his house.
The roof and walls could not keep out the wind,
the rain, the memory of blood running like the rivers
of the West. The morning breath of his century
was cold on his skin. He never felt safe and warm.
And that bastard Franco, the new landlord
of Lorca's bloody earth.
Returning to his country
in defeat, the crowds greeted him as if he were
a stranger. The streets of his homeland could spare
no words of love. There was no time for tears:
another war was raging. He was called to fight
again his heart still beating in the fields of
the dead, but after Spain there was only
Spain. Who was Hitler? Who was Mussolini?
When I walked these peaceful roads, Franco was burning
in hell graffiti sprouting like flowers after a long
dark winter. When I was there, the hills were green
again, the blood had dried, the forty seasons of rain
had rinsed away the dead.
Still I could hear
the screams, could see the burning sky. The earth is
still in mourning. A thousand summer winds will not
sweep away the scent of bodies left to rot in fields
where once, before a war, wild grasses grew amid
the blue and lyric lakes. The waters have been dirtied.
Now, we will have to wait a million years before
we can drink there again. The grandsons of my grandsons
will be dead before the perfect swan returns.
After Spain: For Edwin Rolfe
by Benjamin A. Sáenz
"and always I think of my friend who amid the apparition of bombs
saw on the lyric lake the single perfect swan". Edwin Rolfe
Benjamin A. Sáenz teaches creative writing at the University of Texas / El Paso
