Spain

American Poetry Review, The, Jan/Feb 2004 by Brock-Broido, Lucie

The god-leash leaves

Its lashes on the broad bunched backs

Of sacrificial animals. The whippings stain

Even the muslin of the streets with bright red poppies

On this Sunday morning when the wedding

Would have been as full-blown as the cotton crop

In the hour

Before it's plucked from its scratchy little hulls.

I can say "little"

Now as many times as I goddamn

Want, here in the hour of my forty years & four,

Here beneath the hardback hour of my death or

Past as it will really happen here,

And then the saltwater's salt and its "heal" and sting,

This unholy lovely strapping

Thing, annulled. You will find me then,

A little damp, in

My small Madrid of shame.

LUCIE BROCK-BROIDO is the author of two previous collections of poetry, A Hunger and The Master Letters. A third book, Trouble in Mind, will be out in January 2004. She is Director of Poetry in the School of the Arts at Columbia University.