In 1499, the Medina del Campo in Spain ordered the amputation of Gypsy ears.


You heard hammers pound tambourine hallucinations of India over scolding iron. You heard pits throb inside olives. You heard orange tree branches squeeze out the last sighs of martyred saints. You heard the buzzing of flies where there was too much blue. You heard snow falling from a tree branch across the valley from the Alhambra when the green wasn't too dark. The winter is always dangerous to the artist. "The winter is always dangerous to you," Gauguin wrote to Van Gogh. They buried your severed ears in the soil with the unborn notes still inside, calcifying into stone outside wet, green wombs not even the lizards could reach. But through the stone, you heard the dying moans of the poet, Federico Garcia Lorca, in the fresh soil of an olive grove. He was the one that was going to give you back your ears, like Jesus in the garden with Malchus before the arrest. Give you back your ears. Oh Andalusia, give you back your ears!

Ronda, Spain


Winds of Reconquista, what have you reconquered today? I still see the white horse grazing in the gorge below. You must be losing your touch. Winds of reconquest, once the skin of red sirocco, blood in the cheeks, white blood of broken wind. You once shamed Winter, shaving off her hair in the plaza for all to see, near the bridge where they threw the Fascists to the horses in the gorge. But the horse does not hear you now. You have lost your touch. What can be reconquered in one night?

You say to me, "The shards of glass are outside the room, not inside. You have broken out to me. I never break in. I wait for you. I move towards your warmth soundless, your sleeping body, like the grateful man with the shattered muscles approaching the warmth before the bathwater, at the edge of the ivory. Nowadays, silence is my greatest weapon. I leave all the noise to you."