Black Wine - a poem by Philip Levine

Have you ever drunk the black wine - vino negro -
of Alicante?  The English dubbed it Red Biddy
and consumed oceans of it for a pence a flagon.
Knowing nothing - then or now - about wine,
I would buy a litre for 8 pesetas - 12 cents -
and fry my brains.  Being a happy drunk,
I lived a second time as a common laborer
toiling all night over the classic strophes
I burned in the morning, literally burned,
in an oil barrel outside the Palacio Guell,
one of the earliest and ugliest of Gaudi's
monuments to modernismo.  Five mornings
a week the foreman, Antonio, an Andalusian,
with a voice of stone raked over corrugated tin,
questioned the wisdom of playing with fire.
He'd read Edgar Allen Poe in the translations
of Valle-Inclan and believed the poets
of the new world were madmen.  He claimed an affair
with Gabriella Mistral was the low point
of his adolescence.  As the weeks passed
into spring and the plane trees in the courtyard
of the ancient hospital burst into new green,
I decided one morning to test sobriety,
to waken at dawn to sparrow chirp and dark clouds
blowing seaward from the Bultaco factory,
to inhale the particulates and write nothing,
to face the world as it was.  Everything
was actual, my utterances drab, my lies
formulary and unimaginative.
For the first time in my life I believed
everything I said.  Think of it: simple words
in English or Spanish or Yiddish, words
that speak the truth and no more, hour after
hour, day after day without end, a life
in the kingdom of candor, without fire or wine.

(2011)

Latin America Club

Quote: Fernando Pessoa

"In order to understand, I destroyed myself"

Quote: Levinas

" ... the first fact of existence is neither being in itself nor being for itself but being for the other, in other words, human existence is a creature.  By offering a word, the subject putting himself forward lays himself open and, in a sense, prays."

The attic

Excerpt from a poem by William Blake

"When thought is closed in caves
Then love shall show its root in deepest Hell ..."

from Jerusalem

'Dear Salvation Army' - a poem by Dawn McGuire

You can have the goat
I got for reading my poems
In Willits
He has balded my yard

Now he's grazing my books
The bible from when I was baptized
is his favorite so far
He is a brindle-colored goat

and under  other circumstances
a fine reward for a reading
The poet before me
got fish

Please arrange pick up very soon
I am okay with losing Leviticus
Would like to save Mark
and Ruth

available at IF SF Publishing http://ifsfpublishing.squarespace.com/storage/DawnMcGuire_Interview.pdf