Tramontana (My Dreams This Afternoon)

On a Catalan hill overlooking the specter of Lydia,
the Nightingale of Port Lligat,
and the silhouette form of the great masturbator,
a man stands old beneath the sky's one stormcloud, breathing deep
the heady aroma of promised lightning bolts.
He has chased the cloud and traced its shadow across to this hill
as it promises to drench him, without unhappiness
or recourse past the limits of the beach.
He stands, he shouts; his hands,
like birds once shot at, fly to touch his face.

He tremors calm through tears through widened eyes,
and hands he lends to tensious gravity.

He is;
still.

From view of him my spirit descends
and thresholds the doorway without door (so just a way)
in a wall of flinching whitewash.
The walls ask, You? Where was the day?
I whisper in a voice like the steps of a candleflame's dance:
"She is nothing, nothing, nothing."

And O, the house,
it groans
into the vibrant folds of dusk.

On a Catalan hill overlooking the specter of Lydia,
the Nightingale of Port Lligat,
a man shrieks into the screaming melody of tramontana;
there is lightning in his belly, and his breath
has fallen on the hill,
beyond the reach of his grasp.

*

In the tramontana, the whitewash will refuse to say what it hears
and in its silence I will lose my words,
just as a candleflame goes out and rapidly ascends its dance
in the manner of intertwining pathways

found in channels of rising smoke.