As I read the latest news of Barcelona,
nostalgia envisions evening strolls along
Las Ramblas,
noontime thwarting pickpockets with flashing hands,
penning poems beneath El Mirador de Colom
at the feet of the bringer-of-plagues
who seeded guns and enslavement in America.
His statue soars above the street
and the nearby Telephone Exchange
where Communist thugs destroyed the future
and Anarchist blood filled the square where I once
scribbled.
But what paintings will a future museum display,
if luck lets museums survive?
Watercolors of the bench where I wrote
as the sea devoured it? Of Columbus’s head
as it disappears below the waves?
Fish gamboling among the desks of the police station
below Las Ramblas
where I sat incommunicado for hours
as a cop sought forms in English
for me to write up the pickpocketers
for the courts?
The technicolor spires of Gaudi’s La Sagrada Familia
still erect
while the salty Mediterranean
erodes their foundations below?
Or oils of Montjuig, which I climbed many times
to hear talks of modern plagues,
now a minor island off the coast,
and an unwilling museum
of the doom that capital wrought?
