a Machado, Lorca, et al

I lie to my students. Get the facts wrong.
Read their poems and don’t tell them 
they are the same poems I’d written 
years ago before deciding to despise them.
In the afterlife, always this reiteration of errors,
this hearkening back unto the stark & narrow

chiaroscuro of one’s original attraction
to the dark, the duende whose flamencos
are heeled upon battered wooden planks.
And the lines between sentiment and passion?
How could one describe them without a drink 
in hand of nasty gin or minty mojito?

Tonight in a place nouveau Andaluz,
swart and seemly, Ulrecka dances 
accompanied by a jonesing silk-fingered Pole
plucking the heart from a strung guitar.
Across her face, shadows & grimaces
like a woman making love to herself 

inside the distracted, dilating whole
of her body a-tick with hips & castanets
and steps steeped in pattering vent
down upon the otherwise earthen floor.
Below, lesser ghosts go pissing off
back to the stirred porridge of such grief

as once consumed them, their hunger keened
in the mouth of an authentic gypsy housewife
offering her voice like bread or bridal sheet
seasoned with a spot of blood. That aria gleaned
of gall & cries can’t be taught
but as notes, and of dance, the simplest tithe

is a discipline the flesh merely repeats. 
I lie to my students, despair the lack 
in myself to make visible the ink
inside of each word, am feckless to teach
how to reach beyond postures to the act
bent upon living with what it can & can’t.

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