Amy King

Every Era Builds Character 

When Ramiro Clemente sold his photo doctored

for my first book to me on the streets of Barcelona,

I learned the way to say ‘Barthelona’ with a lisp

and embrace a closer view of what it means to be

completed by the brick walkways off the golden path,

not only by my own American tight-knit security

club of what-goes-on-here-is-designed-with-me-in-mind.

Even the skulls in the archways were not made of light.

What surfaced when Ramiro sold the photo down

river to me, the swelling American taken in

by Gaudi buildings on every corner and gypsies

running at crossroads, splitting into threes with stolen wallets

plus my friend’s passport?  I’ll tell you what surfaces

fell apart when I dipped into Les Quatre Gats

and discovered Picasso would never cross

the threshold of this kinked-up version of why

tourists pay too much to drink here.  Absinthe of the weaker

green and mugs with black cats in gold overlay

populate the view, sculls and white caps of ashy chalk,

to be abandoned in a word, forever, as one

beginning to make sense.  In modern day cities like Barcelona

women still steal your money while men do it too

with the underhanded charm of decades past.  Even the jewels

are made of dusted-off sass, polished at the heels

of fierce flamenco dancers we paid pesetas to dance with.

I stayed in the Gothic Quarter neighboring the Jewish Quarter

when I walked small alleys and avenues wider than what

today’s Paris has on offer.  But before I took the train in,

full of vomit and beer from tin cans, up from Seville

after Malaga, I saw the still-ancient places where women

with gilded yellow teeth are as old and as populous

as the olive trees in fields cracking with limbs the horizon

between everywhere and here.  They reported through

crafted smiles that every era builds character and no one

was ever less informed than the previous or next.  That I

would do best to learn this trick, the back and forth of clocks

means as little now as how much it takes to see a Gaudi

cathedral, which is no cathedral at all, but a basilica built

from a design of the man’s, not by him, one hundred

years after the architect’s expiration.  That we think

at all is a small miracle to be experienced in any large city,

including one full of gypsies and mammals and chickens

for sale on unraveling sidewalks.  That visit I danced

with women in fiery skirts from Sweden and Spaniards

from hillsides I likely would never visit.   I rode

in a burrow-drawn cart around a body

of water pushing at the city, one with a death date

I’ll never swim in, unless I drown soon, and struck

matchsticks in restaurants that served thin fleshly strips

of wild boar and sangria beside salted shrimp tapas.

The world opened its maw wide to Barcelona, and I swear

if I had not left to breathe in the entrails of Paris, I would

have met the next Picasso wandering in Malaga or Cordoba

and taken him back to a Barcelona villa, where we would

squat and grow food on the rooftops and paint the woman

from a photo that would eventually turn into the poet’s

next book cover, already in half-borrowed progress.

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