Andalucia

Gazing out across the blue waters from Algeciras to Gibraltar,
The bay is crowded with ferryboats, cruise liners and tramp steamers,
Fishing boats with felucca sails lean against the wind and current;
Once these straits were the western limits of the world,
And the Phoenicians were the first to pass through them,
And trade in the mineral riches of Tartessos;
For centuries they safeguarded their monopoly with mystery,
Their mariners telling tales in the harbours of the Aegean,
Warning of the terrible dangers beyond the Pillars of Hercules,
Describing the whirlpools round the sunken isle of Atlantis,
The impassable Sargasso weed choking the channels,
The deadly sea monsters lurking everywhere.

I sit outside a café, sipping sol y sombra, under stellar orange trees,
Absorbing the street scene, the incidents becoming dramas,
The striking of attitudes with histrionic sprezzatura;
O, Andalucia, vast peacock’s tail of light!
The jasmine-scented air reeks of joy and melancholy,
And to drink water here is the finest art and pleasure,
Directing a thin stream through the air into the mouth from the bota,
Savouring the delicious taste, a little at a time and slowly,
Lingering as one does over everything most loved.
The roses bloom all year round in Malaga,
Geraniums cascade from balconies, carnations and freesias shine,
Easter lilies appear among the olive trees and date palms,
And in the evening the whole turn turns out for the promenade,
Laughing couples, happy families, beautiful girls.
Here you will be as the dead stick thrust into the earth
That flowers against its will, overpowered by life;
You will ask for so little, and cherish it beyond price,
Sitting with friends over a glass of wine,
Talking for hours, forgetting everything of no account,
Relishing the bite of sardonic humour.
Walk along the beaches, and watch the catch being hauled in,
The boats drawn up on the sand with the magic eye on their prows,
And the fishermen grilling sardines over driftwood fires;
Ancient heaps of murex shells have been found here,
Remains of the dye-works where they made the tyrian purple
For the togas of the Caesars, the colour of the mountains at sunset,
And of the blood of the people dragged from their beds and shot
In the Civil War, when men became werewolves,
And all night there came the sound of gunshots in the darkness,
And in the morning dead bodies lay where they had fallen.
But listen to them now, the carefree peaceful citizens,
Blithely indifferent to politics and all that nonsense,
Burying bad memories in unmarked graves.
Peacocks cry on the Alcazaba’s battlements,
And the scent of hibiscus makes me dream,
The fig trees are sprouting and in a few weeks
Wild oleanders will cover the hillsides with white and pink blossom;
Orange and lemon groves cover the vale,
Wild mignonette, wild irises, conflowers, violets,
Rosemary, cistus, periwinkles, mallows, thyme, vetches,
Wild garlic, harebells, orchises, muscari, chionodoxas,
Gentians, borage, marjoram, alyssum, mesembryanthemum,
Wild ailanthus, scillas, heliotrope, peonies.
They say the malaguenas are the most beautiful girls in all Spain,
With their golden faces and the moist gleam of their eyes,
And something of the sea in their allure,
So graceful and vivacious, nonchalant and proud,
Shooting passionate glances from under their eyelids.
In a tavern room the guitarist sweeps the strings,
And the singer launches himself into cante jondo,
Eyes closed, oblivious to all else but the notes
As they form themselves spontaneously in his mind.

In Córdoba, I sit on a roof garden, looking out over the city at sunset,
Like Emir Abderrahman I surveying his new capital,
Having won a western throne for the Omayyads,
And suddenly the sun has disappeared behind the Sierra,
And the Guadalquivir flows slowly past Moorish water mills.
Entering the great Mosque, I scan the grave reflective gloom,
The myriad columns of porphyry, jasper and coloured marbles,
Built from the ransacked ruins of Carthage, Nimes and Seville.
In the days of the Caliphate the mosque was open to the courtyard
And the long rows of orange trees continued the lines of the pillars
And carried the presence of Allah into the open air,
Perfumed with the aromatic oils of four thousand lamps,
And forty thousand worshippers knelt here at Ramadan
While from the mihrab the Imam recited from the Koran.
Once this was the greatest city in all Europe,
Prre-eminent in size and splendour, wealth, art and learning,
Where the Moors ruled Spain with tolerance and wisdom,
Fusing the genius of Iberian, Visigoth, Jew and Arab
To create a new civilsation, magnificent and unique.
And west of the city I wander the ruins of Medina Azahara,
Built by Abderrahman III to celebrate the Glorious Caliphate
And to gratify his favourite wife, al-Zahra, the Orange Blossom;
Almond trees and pines grow out between broken marble pavement,
Bougainvillea tangles spread purple over crumbling walls;
A third of Andalucia’s revenues went to build the Flower City,
And ten thousand workmen laboured for twenty-five years;
The Great Hall’s walls and ceilings were sheathed in gold,
Its eight doors of gold and ebony were framed by crystal pillars,
And there hung from the ceiling a fabled pearl,
While down the middle ran a pool of quicksilver in a porphyry basin,
And when the Caliph wished to impress a foreign guest
He would have a slave agitate the quicksilver
So that dazzling reflections danced up and down the walls;
Here within this palace he would retire to his harem
And find there always among the thousands of beauties
His beloved and most cherished al-Zahra, most beautiful of all.
Yet this city stood for less than a hundred years,
Sacked and looted when the Caliphate fell;
Now I sit and contemplate the wild irises growing
Out of ruined pavement, as the wind sighs in the cypresses.

With the snowy Sierra Nevada behind, and the sunlit plain,
And the hilltops around crowned with Moorish castles,
Granada stands, and the Alhambra spreads out on its ridge
Against the snows, as the sun moves across the heavens,
Infusing the marble and alabaster stucco with light,
As innumerable rills course all over the majestic hill,
Through the woods and gardens and into the palace courts,
Cool, clear, brilliant water, the wine of enlightened souls,
Precious element that the Arabs could conjure from nowhere
With the magic of djinns, turning desert into paradise.
Here among the lightness and delicacy and surprise
A noble of the court, with pointed beard and hennaed fingernails,
Reclines on cushions, idly watching the jets of water
Sparkling in the sun, his eyes dark with the languid melancholy
Of knowing the transience of all this beauty;
In the distant Yemen his ancestors wore rough camel-hair,
While he wears silk and dwelt among houris and djinns,
Breathing the fragrance of mimosa and myrtle;
Putting out his hand, he caresses the slave-girl lying in his lap,
And, gazing at the sky, dreamily plucks his lute,
Reciting the names of its five magic strings,
Alziar, alchanzar, almetina, almithleta, albonzar…
This is the kingdom of the silkworm,
The mushrabiyyah of the soul,
The dice box of blue protective words,
The blind guitarist’s vision.
Light of my eye, you make me an oculist of dreams…
My retina is a rose window shattered by the dawn,
A noria turning in the light,
The saeta transverberates me,
The sebka of sounds draws me into endless mazes…
Who is the seneschal of this castle, your heart,
And whose eyes scan from the watchtower ?
I will hide under the skirts of Our Lady of the Snows,
Whose white fires burn my hopes to the bone,
Whose heart is the mihrab of aeons…

In Ronda, I look down from the bridge across the chasm
Into the river in the sunless channel far below
And think of how many have thrown themselves to their deaths
From this very spot, and in my heart I am the bull
Staring at the sword point’s killing star, and the matador
In his suit of lights, priest of the bread and wine,
Tracing the signs of sacrifice in the sand.
The procession enters to the sound of the paso doble,
Two constables on horseback, followed by the matadors,
And their teams of picadors and banderilleros;
Then comes the suerte de picar, when the picadors
Drive their lances into the charging bull’s neck,
To weaken and tire him, and make him drop his head,
While the black beast tries to gore the blindfolded horses
Whose vocal cords have been silenced
To prevent any terrified cries from alarming the crowd;
Then the banderilleros attract the bull’s attention,
And deftly place their barbed darts in the victim’s shoulders,
Then finally the matador appears to try his skill,
Using his cape to attract the exhausted animal,
Seeking to drive his sword between its shoulders
And pierce the heart with a single noble thrust;
But more often he will miss, and resort to a second sword
To cut the spinal cord and cause instant death;
Or perhaps, to his shame, he will even fail in this,
And instruct an assistant to drive his dagger into its nape
While the disgusted crowd whistles its derision.

Inside Seville Cathedral, they perform the Dance of the Seises:
The procession approaches the chancel in a cloud of incense,
Ten young boys led by the priests, dressed in opulent suits
Embroidered in white, red and gold, led by the priests,
And stand before the altar, carrying white hats with red plumes,
And turn to face each other in two lines,
And the orchestra strikes up an ancient air,
And the Seises don their hats and begin to dance a slow minuet,
Bringing their feet together at the end of each step
And rising on their toes, then, backi n line,
They finish each sequence with a sudden pirouette,
And at the climax the dancers produce their castanets
And complete their ritual to their staccato accompaniment,
Back in the land of Tarshish, in the kingdom of the bull.
The Feria is coming: even the blind man selling lottery tickets
Taps a flamenco rhythms with his white stick on the pavement,
And spring has arrived overnight, the squares on fire with roses,
And I sit beneath the orange trees, white bloosms falling on my head,
And in the evening amid the scent of jasmine, roses and orange-blossom,
The moon and Venus hover over the city,
The Giralda stands up against scudding clouds,
And the distant throbbing of castanets grows louder every day,
And the town-of-six-days is being constructed,
The avenues festive with fluttering banners and paper lanterns,
Five hundred bright pavilions are appearing out of nowhere;
At the fairground, streams of people ride and walk in the sunshine,
The senoritas in flamenco dresses, flounced and embroidered,
Flowers in their dark hair, as they stop here and there
To dance with impromptu passion on the pavement,
While their sweethearts strike up a tune on the guitar;
Endless cavalcade parades up and down the avenues
Under the acacias’ scented white blooms,
The men in black cordobes hats, frilled shirts and short jackets,
Their girls behind them in flamenco dress, sitting sideways
On the croup, holding them around the waist,
Guitars slung across their saddles, as they move in the rhythm;
A lissom gipsy girl dances in the pavilion, hand on hip,
Striding haughtily around, loosing gay burlerias,
Giving all she has, proud and sensual, exciting the crowd,
And in the casetas men and women dance the sevillana,
The splendid women turning and weaving, skirts swirling gracefully,
Arms twisting sinuously above their flowered heads,
In their ears the crescent moon of Astarte,
As they restrain their voluptuous vehemence to breaking,
Moved by the duende in their limbs,
And the blissful crowd swarms from bar to bar, nibbling tapas,
Washing it down with sherry and kisses,
And nobody sleeps for a week, dreaming on their feet like horses,
All sharing the same dream, the same paradise.
In Holy Week, everyone is on the streets carousing,
Great crowds follow the holy images, to dirges and drumbeats,
Andaluzas in tall combs aaand black lace mantillas,
Penitents in purple and white hoods, carrying a cross in their midst,
And banks of glittering candles process through the dark,
The Virgin sits beneath a canopy, in gold crown and jewel-encrusted robe,
Her dark blue velvet mantle embroidered with gold ands silver thread,
Her float borne on the shoulders of her sweating acolytes.

At Whitsun, for the Romeria del Rocio,
They bring the Virgin out of the church at Triana,
And install her in her portable shrine, decked with flowers,
The ox-drawn wagons move off, and beneath their decorative awnings
Groups of flamencas click castanets, exchanging witticisms
With the young men following on horseback,
And all along the country road they are joined by people
Coming from the villages, converging with the stream,
Until they stop and bivouac among the umbrella-pine groves,
And round the campfire they sing and dance
And pass the bota round from hand to hand,
And amorous couples stray into the depths of the pine forest;
And in the early hours of Pentecost Sunday,
When the revellers are staring in mystical frenzy
Or lie prostrate in inebriated stupor,
The statue of the Virgin is paraded before them.
In the Sierra Morena you will visit the Virgin’s shrines
Remote among chestnut orchards and forests of cork oaks,
Where black pigs graze on the fallen acorns,
And cold springs, hallowed since the days of the shamans
Who gathered the fly agaric from the woods here
That they might shed their skins and fly,
Still bubble up from the underworld.


At Arcos de la Frontera vultures circle above their nests in the cliff,
And the running of the Brandy Bull has come;
The main street is in uproar, pavements, balconies and roofs crowded,
Young maletillas showing off their prowess with an old red cloth on a stick
While a boy charges them with a pair of horns;
Young men serenade the pretty girls on the balconies,
A great roar goes up, when the bull is released at the bottom of the hill,
And charges all and sundry, knocking down maletillas trying to play it,
And bold girls try to get in right behind it
And touch its sacred testicles, to be blessed with fertility
And bear many sturdy children in the years to come;
But when the beast has reached the hilltop
He is already exhausted by the shouting ruck around,
And by the time they get down to the bottom
All the fight has gone out of him,
And in the bullring he is slaughtered, and its flesh
Cut up and sold by the butchers of the town.

Drinking fino at a tapas bar, I admire the pretty girls passing,
And you (you know it is you) are most beautiful of all,
Delicious as pears in wine with cinnamon;
I give you the shadows behind iron convent grilles,
The sweets made by the hands of nuns!
I give you saffron and raisins, and everything precious,
The silver of Tartessos, even, whatever you desire!
All for the scent of jacaranda and the moonlight on your skin!
Horses are galloping along the luminous white beach,
And the fierce light sings its saeta in the skin;
I feel like al-Mu’tadid himself, that pure poet,
Enlarging the Alcazar to house a harem of eight hundred women,
Decorating the terraces with flowers planted
In his decapitated enemies’ skulls.
Will you open to me the camarón?
Will you cense me with the mist and cloud of the sierras?
I bow to you as the mudejar to his Christian queen,
Worshipping my own desert God in my heart.
Come with me to the carnival of Cadiz,
That city of sad limestone crumbling in sea air,
And white marble Phoenician sarcophagi releasing their ghosts,
While musicians parade with lutes, guitars and mandolins,
Singing satirical songs about the famous,
And we, disguised in costume, will kiss in the swirling crowd,
Drunk on sangria, happy as wild horses.